Dave Chappelle Live at Starbucks!

I'm not big on celebrities but obviously Dave Chappelle is different. The Times said last week he's back in circulation after taking time off for self-reflection or whatever. His wife is Filipina, how cool is that? It just so happens that a few minutes ago the brother himself was at the Starbucks on Lavaca at 3rd Street, which is kind of my office, in Austin, Texas, the World Capital of Live Music. I knew something was up when a white chick in one of the easy chairs by the east window lit up and then, a blink later, tried to look cool and uninterested again. I turned my head. He came in with two in the entourage, one guy looked Caucasian which is completely cool, diversity in the supporting cast and all that.

Dave himself came up to the big table where I was working on organic chemistry and said, "Can we sit with you?" For real, he was polite just like an ordinary person. In fact he was more polite than an ordinary person who probably wouldn’t have asked shit before sitting down. Dave was carrying an expensive motorcycle helmet. Did he bring his ride on the plane from wherever? I wanted to ask him what kind of bike he has and tell him that mine, chained up outside, is a three-speed.

 He got his drink and collected his helmet and didn't actually sit down which bummed me out a little. He looked more muscular in person which surprised me too. Somebody tried to stop him on the way out and tell him about seeing his show in New York. I had all kinds of bright repartee thought up while he was in line getting his mocha or whatever but I never got a chance. I could have discussed with him, black male to black male, the cruel realities of growing up in the 'hood, where every day was a struggle just to survive.

Or I could have impressed him with my knowledge of the Fischer esterification process in which an ordinary carboxylic acid, like acetic acid, and an alcohol, primary or secondary and maybe even tertiary (we're still learning the mechanism) is converted into a fragrant smelling ester, like banana oil. If Dave is in town for a show maybe he'll be back in the next day or two. I'll be here. We have our third test next week, organic chemistry is a bitch. Seeing the brother made my day.

My mother, may she rest in peace, would not have approved of Dave Chappelle of course. Let's be honest here. She would've considered him a bad example, a "threat to the advancement of the Negro race," something like that. She caught a bit of Richard Pryor on TV, back in the day, and had heart palpitations. Dave Chappelle is a bad influence. That's what got me so excited that he's here. This city has been gentrified up the ass and now most of my bad influences are white.

It's nice to see the real thing and remember what the Black Race is working for, what we're trying to achieve as a people, and all.

The Jew Mark Clark and the Rapido River Shootout

  Remember the Alamo? Some of that was made up after the fact. A myth of brave men, which the mission’s defenders undoubtedly were, who fought to the last man which they almost certainly did not. It took 150 years more or less for the best source to be uncovered—a memoir by a Mexican Army officer who helped defeat the Texans and who informs us that half a dozen men surrendered and were shot. The manuscript was last said to be in the hands of Texas A&M but doesn't get much play. We’re now about halfway through the same historical cycle on another famous Lone Star battle that has an odor of fabrication or worse. This one features an enduring episode of anti-Semitism and actually had its roots in Italy's bucolic Liri Valley, in January 1944, where the U.S. 36^th Infantry Division, a former National Guard unit known unofficially as the Texas Division—or Texas Army as its soldiers liked to say, and famous for a T shoulder patch on their uniforms—crossed a river on a mission. 

It didn’t bode well that the body of water was not the Rapido River, as planned, but the Gari, a detail that only came to light some years after the war. The German commander speaking post-bellum said that the assault was so disorganized he did not know at the time that it was a major attack. The Texans would gain fame later in the war, in France and in Bavaria, even taking prisoner Nazi Number Two Herman Goering. But that would be Germany in the spring of ’45 and this was Italy during the winter of '43, on the road to Rome, real estate that had at that point in time been fought over for more than two thousand years. The most extraordinary statistic regarding the Texan casualties at the Rapido is that almost half or 900 men were simply missing the next day, floating down the river—or lost, or surrendered which Texans don’t do but they did at the riverbank, apparently in droves. Two whole regiments of the 36^th were broken and there were consequences. 

On March 2, 1944, Texas Independence Day, according to one source,  “with memories of the disaster still fresh, a group of 25 officers of the 36^th Division met in an Italian farmhouse and pledged to do everything possible to prompt a postwar inquiry.” The failure of the attack would shake the State of Texas after the war, leading to a Congressional inquiry after accusations that a lone Jewish officer had destroyed the best of Lone Star manhood—and prompting whispering that continues even today. All in the name of the sideshow that was Italy during World War II. What started that night with an artillery barrage “to soften the Germans up” went wrong quickly and turned even uglier later in Austin. But the gunfight at the Gari, as one would more accurately call it, was a shaky undertaking from the start. There was a bridge that had to be crossed under fire and over the course of the night the attacking Texans made it to the far bank. The next night more men crossed. On the near side of the river, before the shooting started, the expected narrative was Texas exceptionalism, the Alamo redux with an equally glorious result but this time a victory. No one told the Germans. Afterwards the State of Texas's honor required a scapegoat and for that luckily there was a Jew. The attack didn't succeed but that didn't mean it didn't need to be ordered, a Congressional inquiry found that the assault ordered by General Clark was daring but not reckless, case closed. If anything, his reputation has grown, except in Texas where, dead these many years, he is still hated.

There’s a cool old film, probably made by the Signal Corps at the end of the war. It looks like central or Western Europe, maybe Germany, in the garden of a schloss or French castle. No sound but the film shows all the top U.S. Army commanders in Europe socializing, including General Eisenhower and his right hand General Bradley. Clearly these are the victors or the soon-to-be victors. And the survivors. General Patton himself, looking typically bellicose, wearing a ceremonial cavalry uniform—sidearm and polished helmet, like for a parade—is in the garden too. In the clip there’s also a fleeting view of a tall and thin, elegant officer who looks like he could have been a movie producer or Wall Street banker. That's Mark Clark of 5^th Army. The tendency in the American Army of the period—dominated by Southern-born Protestant officers—was to paint General Clark as somehow not real Army, not like the others. That is wrong. He grew up on post, son of an U.S. infantry officer and a Rumanian Jewish mom. Inevitably the horror of what happened at the Rapido has become caught up in our feeling for the man who ordered the attack. Just a few years ago there were whispers still of a yearly reunion, usually in Lubbock—many of the men who served were from West Texas, for whatever reason. The reunion was for survivors of a ghost company of the 36^th that started the Rapido fight with more than 120 men and ended with 17 soldiers and the officers dead.

How and why get rehashed continuously, in books, in colloquia, in chatrooms and on Facebook. These missives mostly have one thing in common, blaming the commanding general. Just last month a woman wrote on the 36^th Division Association Facepage, “There are no Mark Clark fans in this family,” as hating the general is now passed down generation to generation. The Battle of the Rapido River—“Gunfight at the Gari” is better and sounds more authentic to a Texan ear. It's all just another example of the Lone Star myth, the idea that in some areas of human commerce, violence being one, Texans do it better than anyone else. 

The British liked to say that the Germans were “easy to trick but hard to panic” and after an artillery bombardment warned of a coming attack, the Texans' only chance was if the Germans panicked which they did not. That was not explanation enough later in Austin however. And even today on websites devoted to military history there’s bullshit chatter about “the Jew Clark being promoted,” after the battle, “by the Jew Eisenhower,” although General Eisenhower was not Jewish. As with the Alamo, neither logic nor fact has been consistently applied. The big-balled Texan persona is everywhere however. Today if you visit the National Guard barracks at Camp Mabry, in West Austin, there’s a museum much-devoted to the 36^th, and a marker tells you all you need to know about the spirit of the troops. “In bars and clubs, both at home and, eventually, overseas, soldiers who wore the T-Patch insignia of the division were apt to insist that everyone within earshot stand when they sang ‘The Eyes of Texas.’ If men from other units refused to do so, the result was usually a brawl.” As for the commanding general, the plaque reads, “Bitter survivors swore they would never forgive Mark Clark for ordering the hopeless assault and most maintained a healthy hatred or disgust for the general for the rest of their lives.” Unlike the Alamo where facts were lacking for so long, the events in the Liri Valley are more a question of interpretation, not dueling details. In the Rapido context it wouldn’t have mattered if Mark Clark was black or Hispanic or Muslim, or if the era were today. Whether it’s money in play, or power, or as with the officers and men of the 36^th—reputation—there’s always a reason for blaming others. Race is the excuse. Witness Robert E. Lee, who ordered the charge at Gettysburg that caused 6,000 casualties among his own men, including over 1,000 dead, and doomed the Confederacy, but Southerners were still naming their sons after him for generations. And in the Texas narrative, the bloodier the better. It was losing that hurt so bad.

General Clark had influential defenders even at the time. Dwight Eisenhower is said to have described Mark Clark as the best staff officer he ever knew, which is considerable praise since President Eisenhower’s own reputation in the Army was built on being a good staff officer. For his part General Clark never testified before Congress and is said to have never spoken publicly, after the war, about what happened at the Gari. But he did put his thoughts down on paper. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can minimize the losses of the 36^th Division, which I selected for the tough unglamorous job at the Rapido because I knew its men had the stuff to get across the river if anybody could.” He was totally unapologetic of the pressure to win that everyone was under in Italy, including the enemy, backwater theater of operations or not. “I heard no more about this attack until after the war, when I was stationed in Vienna. At that time, a meeting of former officers of the 36^th Division in Texas passed a resolution asking Congress to investigate the Rapido River failure, which was blamed entirely on me.” Vendetta was next.

When he was nominated by President Truman as Ambassador to the Vatican, Texas' senior U.S. Senator Tom Connally protested. (Future president LBJ who was junior senator did not object to the appointment.) Protestants are said to have objected because of Clark’s parentage even though troops under his direct command liberated Rome from the Nazis. For which he was also criticized, by the British, who called General Clark a glory-hound. When the road to Rome was finally open, and the Germans were in retreat, instead of chasing the Nazis, General Clark went to the Eternal City, can you blame him, the first European capital to fall to the Allies during the war. His later career proved that he was indeed a great general.

During the fighting in Korea, after Douglas MacArthur was sacked as commander of United Nations forces, a tactician was brought in, to stabilize the military situation. Then General Clark assumed command in order to finalize the ceasefire with the People's Republic and North Koreans. That was a staff officer's job and one that he accomplished. He was the kind of general whose battlefields include a negotiating table. Later in Washington, where he also served, he coined the phrase “intelligence community” for the matrix of federal agencies that Edward Snowden recently outed. In the end Texans did not forgive him but the Army's officer class accepted him. The general's final posting was as superintendent of The Citadel, in the heart of the old U.S. Army establishment. That appointment officially ended the second Battle of the Rapido River, fought after World War Two and won by General Mark Clark. Both the first and second battles of the Rapido were lost by Texans.

          

Black Power Revisited the L.P.

          

 Mother once received a letter from William Faulkner. Or so she said. The letter was supposedly from the Nobel-prizewinner himself—the writer who Flannery O’Connor, no mere scribbler herself, called the Dixie Limited. Faulkner was master of Southern Gothic among whose haunting characters are the bear of “The Bear” and my personal favorite Joe Christmas the mulatto killer of Light in August. Mother said she threw Faulkner’s letter away. Her papers are now at Emory University, my siblings did it without consulting me, not that that’s a problem, maybe one day an archivist will come across Faulkner’s note. Probably not. But the chances that Mother did receive a communication from the great man are better than even and even though accuracy was not always a hallmark of her work.

My mother was fortunate to live and work in another time when there were only a couple of degrees of separation between most people. African Americans were either still slaving for a white man or white woman or not. Mother was a black female journalist in an age when that particular description was unheard of, not that it’s common even today. And the world was a smaller place back then. Blacks involved in the arts or letters or politics knew each other because there weren’t many to know, especially if they were making a living doing whatever they did. And you knew white people because they were running things then as now. White society was based on skin color and wealth but in our own culture there was a studied informality because most everyone was black and poor. Our intelligentsia included and includes many athletes and performers. Due in part to Communist influence—Brother and Sister served the same as Comrade. Mother wasn’t a Red but she knew a few. There was cooperation, you feel me, achieving common aims.  

Once we were short of money and in New York City, where the New York Times wasn't hiring black people, and Mother drove in a black Mercury Comet—with me in the back seat—to a club where Duke Ellington was playing. His name was on the marquee outside. This would have been '61 or '62, that era, Kennedy had been elected but not yet killed, in the historical context, and in my personal life my older brother was getting on my nerves. Mother said she was going into the theater to get “Duke” to cash a personal check. She came back with money, what can you say? It was a smaller community being black back then. So, like, the backstory on the Faulkner letter is that Mother was editor of a small African-American newspaper in L.A. back in the day and she had a fondness for writing provocative editorials about race relations at a time and in a place—the Golden State of California—in the years just after World War II—when diversity was not as popular a concept as it is today. After publishing fiery prose she licked stamps and mailed copies to social and political leaders who, not being subscribers to the Tribune, otherwise might not see her work. One piece made its way to Oxford, Mississippi, home of the Dixie Limited. My mother recounted for me Faulkner’s response in a single sentence, either that was all she retained or all he had written, it’s still etched in my memory more than half a century later. And once again it’s my belief that the chances are better than 50-50 this is fact not factoid, not because Mother was unfailingly accurate in her reportage but because of what she reported that Faulkner said. 

“I am all for the emancipation of the Negro,” she quoted the great man, “but if they come marching down my street I’ll be waiting on my porch with my shotgun.” If that wasn’t William Faulkner it should have been. 

The reason to remember the Dixie Limited today is not just great prose, even if he was dismissive of the Negro and even if his characters preyed upon blacks just as flesh and blood whites did and do. The reason to remember William Faulkner is because he understood thoroughly the fundamental aspect of the struggle over ethnicity in this country. It's been about violence—committing it, being victim of it or writing about it, as with Faulkner and my mother. 

One evening in my relative youth my then-sister-in-law the playwright Pearl Cleage who came from militant stock explained the Black Liberation tri-color flag to me. “Black is for the people, green is for the land,” she told me in complete earnest, looking me dead in the eye, “and red is for the blood that must be shed to get there.” She looked at me for a moment longer still, to be sure the message had been passed on. My mother shed blood in print. One of my siblings even described the rat-a-tat-tat of a Smith-Corona typewriter, throughout the 1960s and usually after midnight, sounding like gunfire, into the morning. 

As for rhetoric or the actual words themselves—Faulkner had that right too. And there we haven’t done too badly either. You knew that racism was doomed when Motown got involved, protest you could dance to. Music, painting, movies, TV—daily interactions with the white man or white woman—decentralization and the wide reach of the civil rights movement has been its genius. There has been a rebellion going on and everyone is involved but no one in control, on or off the field. Led by performers or athletes as everyone everywhere seems to know what to do without being told. And we keep notes. We have the clippings because of people like my mother.

Her magazine work, though limited, was outstanding. There’s a piece she wrote about crossing the South by bus, back in the day, being in West Texas and forced to drink from a blacks-only water fountain, the classic symbol of Jim Crow oppression next to a noose, in the Greyhound terminal in Big Spring. That scene is part of my memory of family outings as a kid, just like going to Duke to cash a check. That story was in The Nation, actually, getting a drink at the black water fountain in Big Spring. A dispatch from the front in the race wars, so to speak.

If you asked me as a kid what Jim Crow was like—as it was explained to me by Mother at the time, on the road in the Comet until it died and then on the seats at the back of the Greyhound bus—it was like a tax that was added to your daily life and you paid and you paid and you paid and if you stopped paying they killed you or sent you to prison. Does that sound extreme? Not in our social circle. 

Mother praised Yassar Arafat in her later years. “I am not Jesus Christ,” she liked to say, old Negro wisdom that described her own foreign policy, “if someone strikes me I’m not going to turn the other cheek.” There are so many stories—because she lived in interesting times. That doesn’t mean it’s all true. The most important anecdote to verify—her defining moment as a journalist—was in the Bay Area and also defines her as a black woman in America. It needs to be confirmed, thumbs up or thumbs down—factual or not—whether Mother really ratted out University of California Professor Angela Davis to the FBI after the Marin County Courthouse Massacre. As above, the chances are better than 50-50 it's true. 

Mother was covering cops for the Hearst paper in San Francisco, then the Examiner, now the Chronicle—her boss was Randy Hearst whose daughter Patty—nom de guerre Tania, you couldn't make this up—was principal femme fatale of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA, as in “slay.” Just like the incestuous inbred Dixie we had escaped, the Bay Area was also home to some freaky shit. The other extreme politically but just as extreme and just as dangerous, maybe more. So, like, everyone—it seemed—it’s important to pause for a moment and note that my mother’s professional reputation is at stake here. She wasn’t alone. Everyone had conflicts of interest, those days in the Bay Area, no one was pure in service of whichever ideology. Everyone in San Francisco knew someone who was on the run, from the police or from the draft board, it was a time when, if the cops found marijuana in your backpack you could still go to prison, especially if there was a hand grenade with the weed. The moral question of the day in San Francisco and in Oakland was whether to call the FBI tipline. 

Mother claimed that she saw Tania one day on the street in the Financial District, my mother was coming or going to the newspaper offices, Patty was being sought at that point principally for bank robbery—we won’t get into that. It was possible that Mother did see Tania. We'll never know. At this point it was relatively late in my mother's career as a newspaper reporter, covering cops for Randy Hearst and trying to keep an eye out for the boss's daughter on any story where there was gunplay. My mother had to hump it, frankly, it was a hard job in the Bay Area especially where there was a lot of gunfire and there were a lot of cops, state, federal and local. The Black Panthers respected her, that was important, but the Bay Area’s institutions were all under siege, including the Panthers, and a lot of civic interchange ended up on the police blotter. A la the Red Brigades or Bader-Meinhof Gang, mostly it was overachieving white kids but there were all races and colors. Everyone had a plan to change society while knocking over a branch bank of Wells Fargo in the meantime. Today the goal of terror is to kill a lot of people but back then it was to kill certain people and Mother saw it all covering San Francisco P.D. 

There was the gunfight—some call it a massacre—at the Marin County Courthouse, across the Bay, where Judge Haley got killed, which was the bloodiest somehow for me as a kid even though the body count was relatively low. Have you ever seen the photograph of His Honor with the barrel of a shotgun taped to his head? That was the Marin massacre, and it changed Mother's life. Because after Marin, University of California Professor Angela Davis did a runner.

Mother had good sources among black revolutionary cadres, apparently better than the FBI—she found out that Dr. Davis was in hiding in New York. That is the backstory, that is another anecdote from my childhood, and Mother wrote the story, God forbid. Randy Hearst published it and the FBI picked up Dr. Davis in N.Y. a short while later, on a charge of having provided the guns used in the courthouse in Marin. That’s the story that my family accepts as factual today, more or less. It’s part of my memory—kind of—borderline, out there in the haze, in the periphery of what was important to me at age fourteen, going to school in the Oakland hills, thank you very much, not in the Badlands of downtown Oakland where a Negro could get killed. Tom Hanks was in the class behind me at Skyline High, btw, how cool is that? Although we didn't know he was a big deal at the time.

There were so many shootings and so many shoot-outs that it was hard as a kid to know which ones to worry about. The SLA killed the Oakland school superintendent, by the way, a few months before me and my siblings enrolled in the district. The superintendent was a brother with a PhD—which was a big deal back then—a highly-educated Negro, of which there was a shortage, no fault of our own. 

Dr. Marcus Foster, may he rest in eternal peace. Dr. Foster answered his door one night and they shot him with cyanide-tipped bullets, everything was so over the top, so bloody, you couldn't just kill somebody you had to kill them a certain way. Please. Anyway my mother wrote the story, Angela Davis got picked up and even if she beat the charges which she did—it’s still a legitimate question. Did Mother sell out The Movement? The answer is in a box at Emory. My belief is that what she saw in San Francisco frightened her first and then changed her forever. She got us out, actually, relocated the family to L.A. while she continued to commute during the week to work in Baghdad by the Bay. There in the city she shared an apartment with my sister Michelle, may she rest in peace also, who wrote about movies for Hearst. Michelle claimed to have discovered Bruce Lee, by the way, and my bet is that is not true. Anyway, it was all too much for Michelle too, in the end. She went mad in S.F. That’s my belief too—that era, that time. She did it in the right order though, she went crazy in San Francisco but died in L.A.

Michelle had a favorite T-shirt, white with black letters reading across the front, "RATED X BY AN ALL-WHITE JURY." After a while it seemed like it was the only one she wore. She had the predisposition, too much serotonin or too little and San Francisco was the wrong place to be. 

To be young, artsy and black in a city with no moral code--values gone, or in transition—no barriers to behavior, in an era of no restraint. It drove her crazy literally. One Friday when Mother was home in Southern California, on her day off, there was a call from the City Desk in San Francisco. The Symbionese Liberation Army was cornered in what the press would later call a “bad part" of Los Angeles, which meant a black neighborhood. 

The SLA viewed itself as a military unit and a family with Field Marshal Cinque at its head, btw. That's all the background you need. They'd made the move to the Southland for the climate, you might say, like my own family, and it turned hotter than expected. 9,000 rounds were fired that day or so the Chronicle reported. 

The FBI and LAPD both poured bullets into the house and a fire erupted and all six people inside died. It was a brutal day in a brutal time and what the City Desk most wanted to know, when Mother came home to call in her notes, as the authorities identified the bodies—this is my memory and it may not be totally accurate but it’s close. What the City Desk wanted to know first and foremost was Tania among the dead? Which she was not. 

Anyway, that was pretty much it, emotionally, physically and mentally for Mother, not Tania, although Tania took it hard too when they busted her ass later, in Baghdad by the Bay. Mother could take joy in the civil rights movement because she grew up in it, the Panthers always called her Mrs. Lomax after all, not by her given name—sometimes “Sister,” but probably not more than once. The Black Panthers knew she was from another generation and the title Mrs was important. But when you added the SLA and the Weathermen to the mix, and everyone else who had a gun or a grievance, it was just too much for her. She started to shut down. Mother was pretty much PTSD by that point, she hung up her notebook and tried to make sense of what she had seen. Retired at age fifty-five. And barely left the house for the next four decades. It did give her time to write.

Her principal long work, the writing that she is best known for but never published is a novel called The Ten Most-Wanted White Men, the account of a young brother, just out of the U.S. Army and knowing how to kill, who decides to assassinate the ten most prominent white bigots in America. How cool is that? Which turns out to be a difficult but interesting task. 

One of the targets—Mother told me while she was deep in the writing—was Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace. She used real names, that was the beauty of her work. This was before Governor Wallace repented and found God, of course. Mother never did repent or find God, this was her revolution and in some sense it's mine, thru her. It's been bloody and if it were up to my mother it would have been bloodier still. 

The bottom line in anecdotes like these from The Movement and in our black lives, these last few decades, roughly the span of my lifetime because Mother did not live to see the mountain top—or maybe she just did, not close up but distant and in a haze. The single message that has been repeated time and time again in the last 400 years of our co-existence with white people on this continent: Resist any way you can. Violence is okay, by whatever means, you feel me? 

There’s been no fixed orthodoxy, no Little Black Book like Mao's Little Red Book although someone should write one now just to make it sound as if, for historical purposes—for dramatic usage—we were more organized than we really were. No master plan ever existed—there were diverse ways of taking down the competition. Violence aside, the words, longform like Faulkner. Southern Gothic is a perfect title of the genre because it really was some freaky shit.   

Justice Scalia's Almost Ambulance Ride to Alpine

The first mistake in the ruminations regarding the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, at a West Texas dude ranch, is that the closest hospital was two hours north in Alpine, the so-called capital of the Trans Pecos. The closest hospital was actually south not north, just across the Rio Grande in Ojinaga, a small Mexican government facility that serves the locals in a town where Texans sometimes go to buy medications and to have the occasional cheaper medical procedure. Mexicans also cross the border going the other way for health care.

The closest major medical center south or north of the border is in the city of Chihuahua, four hours away by car or ambulance. Chihuahua is a big modern city and presumably an important American official would have received good care there but it’s a long trip to make in an emergency. Especially for pregnant women: Some Mexicanas living along the Rio Grande who have at-risk pregnancies decide instead to cross the river to the U.S. border station between O.J., as Ojinaga is known, and the Texas city of Presidio. The first thing these ladies do when they get across the river is call 911. Or so it is said. An ambulance from Presidio takes them to Alpine to the Big Bend Regional Medical Center where the labor & delivery unit is well-regarded and where a neonatal intensive care-worthy infant can be bundled up and shipped by aircraft to a bigger-city hospital, usually in Odessa, in the West Texas oilfield. 

Justice Scalia might not have liked it but that’s the reality of life on the border. Traffic goes both ways. A border is not always a barrier. Texas women go south for abortions and Mexican women come north to give birth. A doctor in Alpine who has cared for some of these Mexican moms describes the events leading to the blessed event this way: “You see them walking around the central square in O.J., to provoke labor, and then they walk to the bridge and call for the paramedics.” It may not be exactly like that—but close enough for purposes of discussion. 

When the mom-to-be gets in the ambulance the Border Patrol doesn’t come along for the ride, btw. So it’s actually a way into the United States without papers and, God forbid, without having passed a security screening. Justice Scalia probably wouldn’t have approved of that either. At least he could've taken comfort, most of the women are Catholic, as was he, and they opted not to have the abortion that he so strongly disapproved of as a judge.

Everyone wonders who can declare a death, btw, after the contretemps surrounding Justice Scalia's passing, and the reality in rural Texas, especially this part of rural Texas, as has been noted elsewhere, is not like the rest of the state or the country. I spent a couple of years working as a R.N. in the Alpine hospital and I declared people dead even though I’m neither a physician nor a judge. Never did it by telephone—as was done with the late Supreme Court justice. That seems problematic, but in person it’s a pretty easy call to make. Unlike Justice Scalia, the folks whose eyes I closed or my sister nurses closed, officially and in fact, were not sudden deaths. They were patients who were on their last journey, for a few days at least, and who happened to reach their final destination at Big Bend Regional Medical Center. Outside town, God knows: Some of the ranches in Brewster County for example, Presidio County’s neighbor and home to Alpine and the hospital, some of those West Texas ranches are bigger than whole cities. In the Big Bend you hear stories, perhaps apocryphal, of people who died years ago and family members put them in a freezer and are still collecting Social Security checks. Who would know if you’re dead if you didn’t come to town even when you were still capable of making the trip? 

About that missing Presidio justice of the peace, who should have gone to Cibolo Creek Ranch to officiate over Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia: In this part of the world, if you’re out there in that brush country—which is no country for old men, trust me, filmmakers are right about the desolation. You feel like you’d have just as good a chance of running into the Secretary General of the United Nations—or a prima ballerina from the Bolshoi—as you would be of finding a public official. Not a cop, though. They’re everywhere: federal, state and county varieties. In that respect—homeland security—somehow you feel Judge Scalia would have approved. 

I don’t own a car. Don’t actually have a driver’s license, either. I arrived on the train which stops in Alpine two or three times a week going east or west, and I got around by bicycle. During two long years my only trips out of the Big Bend were to Austin or El Paso by rail, to shop, or south by bus to Presidio, on my way into Mexico, to visit the beach in Chiapas or to meet the harvest in Oaxaca. 

Rode my bike one time and never again, it nearly killed me, to the spring-fed pools in the state park at Balmorrhea because they were advertised as being "like Barton Springs in Austin" which turned out to be true, only better, and I bummed a ride with friends to Marfa a couple of times, a completely wasted trip from my point of view. Marfa is a hipster’s mirage—it's all shimmery on the horizon but when you arrive you find nothing there. 

What about nature, you may ask? 

How about the flora and fauna? Isn’t that why people move to the Big Bend in the first place? In the morning, going to work on my bike, there were javelina in my yard, rooting around for fallen pecans, and in the light from my bicycle all you could see were their startled red eyes. Their vision is supposed to be pretty bad, so is mine, a bad combination, and you have to be careful not to get between a javelina and something to eat. Arriving at work, there was often a community of mule deer in the hospital parking lot, and raccoons around the back door. The locals say deer like to hang out in Alpine during hunting season, which makes a certain sense. Deer may be evolving, not just getting older as a species but getting better, you know?

My existence in the Big Bend sounds much more picturesque in the telling than it was in the living. Being slow on the uptake, it took me two years to realize there wasn’t much for me there. As an urban and one likes to think urbane black man who likes Marvin Gaye and vegetarian food and who likes to find the occasional good Christian white woman and rub her nude body with warm olive oil while her husband eats Blue Bell ice cream from a half-gallon tub? And, as someone who dislikes the police with a passion, whatever the uniform—it really was a desert for me, the High Chihuahua Desert in fact. People say that everyone who comes to live in the this part of Texas is escaping something and that included me. 

Let me say from the start that I’m completely normal and well-adjusted. But I arrived in the Trans Pecos from the Pacific Northwest and I wanted somewhere that wasn’t Seattle where it rained every day and the people were dark but not black. 

Alpine wasn’t Seattle because it didn’t rain every day. As an essentially big city soul my view of the Trans Pecos was strictly defined not by nature or wide open spaces but by four towns: Alpine, in Brewster County, Ft. Davis in Jeff Davis County—home to the McDonald Observatory where on a clear night and with the naked eye you can see satellites pass overhead. And Marfa and Presidio, both in Presidio County across the Rio Grande from O.J., not far from where Justice Scalia met his Maker. On the outskirts of this roughly-defined square are Ft. Stockton and Pecos, both oilfield towns by the way, or former oilfield towns now that the boom has bust. Both towns remind me of a line in an old Bette Davis movie, an observation which applies in West Texas as much as in Hollywood: “What a dump!” 

In this part of the world, there are four courthouses, three jails and by my count four supermarkets—three of which are owned by the same people—and only one McDonald’s, in Alpine, near the college.

  

There’s just the one college in the Big Bend, and one hospital, also in Alpine, the one Justice Scalia would have been taken to, if he had been merely ill and not already beyond help. There’s one head shop, near the college of course, owned and operated by a Jewish family from Mexico, that the local authorities have tried repeatedly to shut down. A nurse who was a co-worker of mine and who lasted a few years in Ft. Davis before finally getting a divorce and getting out—she moved to Austin, which is where people from Alpine or Marfa go, not to El Paso or San Antonio which are closer, but to Austin, which says something, I'm not sure what. Anyway this other nurse told me, not long before my own departure, me getting ready to take the train out, that there are only three things to do in the Big Bend region: Have sex, get drunk or do drugs. I would add shoot guns and hike in the park.

Mostly, if you’re in Alpine, you hear about Marfa. 

         “Beyonce is in Marfa,” a young woman who was working as a waitress indirectly informed me one day at the Alpine coffee shop. She was talking to one of her regular customers. Then she said that the U.S. Olympic men’s swim team was there too and she knew because she’d just slept with one of the swimmers. She actually served Beyonce in Marfa, she was telling someone at another table, and also served the Big B’s entourage, and found Mrs. Jay Z completely cool. “Mathew McConaughey is in Marfa!” was a headline in the Alpine newspaper once. “Chelsea Clinton is in Marfa,” came from radio news. All of which was true, they were all there, but what no one could answer—this is crucial—what did they do? 

            Fuck all is my best guess, because there’s fuck all to do in Marfa. But who am I to judge? I liked Alpine well enough. One, it has a hospital, which meant a paycheck, and two, many of the people who came there, like me, were eventually headed somewhere else, so there was a certain interest factor, you could ask people where they were from or where they were going. 

            If you roll down the highway from the center of town toward the hospital, a route Justice Scalia’s ambulance would have traveled, which is also the road to Ft. Davis, on the right is a satellite federal courthouse where a lone judge arraigns drug dealers and illegal immigrants. I was bored one day and went in to watch justice at work in the Western District of Texas, but the marshals rushed me and said it was not a public hearing. These were the very agents of the White Power Structure that the black man had fled to the Trans Pecos region to escape in the first place, btw. Like the great boxer Joe Louis famously said, you can run but you can't hide.

           Around a corner near the golf course, behind a high fence, is some kind of government listening post that everyone pretends doesn’t exist. Again, Justice Scalia would presumably have approved if the surveillance issue ever came before the Supreme Court. 

          Next along the highway after the federal courthouse is another large building with high walls and an electric gate, and no sign out front, the Big Bend’s U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters. It’s said that 1500 of Alpine’s 6,000 inhabitants are gun-carrying law enforcement, mostly Border Patrol, a figure that I personally don’t believe but suffice it to say that you wouldn’t want to try to rob either of the town’s two banks because you wouldn’t reach the exit. Someone in line behind you would almost certainly be packing a piece, maybe even a chick. In my apartment complex living next door to me was this hot young black woman with tattoos. There are, like, no Negroes in this part of the world, I was totally misled by the Chamber of Commerce—except at the college where a few brothers come to play ball. Anyway this black chick had a wicked body that got my attention right away. Border Patrol! Stop, manos arriba: You would think, feeling the way I do about cops that I might actually want to screw one, especially a federale, but no thank you. 

Saw this chick’s Facebook page and she was from somewhere out east and I felt sorry for her—a fine sister, out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of cowboys. Until I read that she liked cowboys, which there’s an abundance of in the Big Bend, not in absolute number but relatively-speaking.

Farther along the road toward Ft. Davis there’s a High Desert research station on the right and on the left a treatment facility for troubled youth, a type of boot camp that follows something called the “Positive Peer Culture Treatment Model,” where Hollywood A-listers send their children to get them out of L.A. and reacquainted with reality. The names of parents who have sent their kids to the Big Bend facility would impress you. On the other end of the age spectrum, there’s no nursing home. There was one but it shut down a few years ago after the state cited it for inadequacies. The hospital was owned by Brewster County but it cost too much to run and the county fathers and mothers decided to privatize. Community Health Systems of Franklin, Tennessee came in and built a new hospital that is now considered “critical access” by the federal government which means the company gets an incentive to be there, which includes latitude in charging for services, beyond what law and practice normally allow. 

If Justice Scalia had actually made it to the emergency room in Alpine, and for purposes of argument let’s say it was his heart, which has been speculated upon—he had a bad heart, say some, no heart was another opinion. He would have been shipped out. Big Bend Regional Medical Center doesn’t do acute heart cases except to stabilize the patient, unless he or she refuses to be transferred which would not be a smart move if you just had a heart attack.

Transfer out usually means an air ambulance. Air travel is safer mile for mile than the highway but that does not necessarily include air ambulances, which have a checkered history. This is a divided region economically, a lot of wealthy people who may have second homes in the Trans Pecos, maybe a ranch, and a lot of poor or struggling middle class who live here year round. One of the rich included a Folger’s brand coffee heiress who was being shipped out on an air ambulance a few years ago, for one ailment or another, and the plane started to rise and slammed into a mountain on the edge of town. Everyone died. 

The other risk is financial. The air ambulance ride—if you don’t have the right insurance—can cost $50,000 to go to Medical Center Hospital, in Odessa where most of the transferred patients are sent. That’s what you owe before treatment even begins. I don’t know what kind of insurance a Supreme Court justice has, presumably it’s good, but if not it might make a conservative jurist think twice about Obamacare. 

I was always amazed how few gunshot wounds were seen at the hospital. You would think that with Bubba on the loose we’d fill up every weekend at Big Bend Regional, once the alcohol kicked in. But while there’s an affection for firearms in West Texas there’s also respect. Justice Scalia would approve the distinction. The Republicans have a point, it seems to me, that weapons are kind of like sex, they’re here to stay and the best solution may be to teach people how to use them. Just as sex education may not engender promiscuity, it’s a fact of life, like Democrats argue. Rest assured that in the Big Bend if someone pulls a gun they’re probably going to hit what they’re aiming at and not six other people on the sidewalk. If only because there aren’t six other people on the sidewalk, an unexpected blessing of the low population density. Most places in the Big Bend there’s not even a sidewalk. 

Ultimately the area wasn’t for me. Had he survived, however, this is exactly the kind of place Justice Scalia should have lived, not the District of Columbia. This is the place he was writing his judicial opinions for, a way of life that no longer exists in highly-urbanized America but is quotidian near Big Bend National Park. The reach of government—except the Department of Homeland Security—is marginal. People don’t rely on a publicly-funded safety net either. They rely on family and neighbors, even more than in the rest of the Lone Star State, and this is saying a lot, they’re usually packing. In the Big Bend there's guns, gross economic inequality and expensive private health care. For Judge Scalia, had he lived, this would have been paradise. In death it must be Heaven.