The Queen of Big Pharma Talks the Covid-19 Vaccine

 There’s been a pissing match between President Trump and the world’s second-richest man, Bill Gates, and Gates’ wife Melinda, who is from Dallas btw, about the president’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis and for good reason. We won’t go there. Instead what’s interesting is how the individuals involved, none of who is a doctor or has any kind of healthcare training or research cred, has been so sure of what they’re talking about. At the heights of power or wealth you can hire experts. 

In fact the president has been widely criticized for doing just that, hiring Big Pharma ex-executive Moncef Slaoui—former head of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division—to lead the U.S. government’s push for a COVID-19 vaccine. In the early days of the pandemic the Gates Foundation had its own veteran of Big Pharma leading vaccine efforts too. Her name is Susan Desmond-Hellmann—everyone calls her Sue. You can bet Sue was where the Gateses got their information to challenge the president. She's produced a few medicins herself. Then she stepped down from the Gates foundation, perhaps because it’s hard to criticize the president when your science guy, or girl in this case, has worse ethics than his does. Sue has returned to her first love, Big Pharma, as a director of Pfizer. She has just made her own pronouncements on a COVID vaccine and it’s especially scary coming from this scary lady doctor.

Dr. Desmond-Hellmann served as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s CEO for almost six years and is an oncologist by training. Described as über-competent and very focused—the way Atilla the Hun was—she is a former chancellor of the University of California’s healthcare campus in San Francisco and before that was president of product development at drugmaker Genentech (now owned by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche.) While concerns have been raised about the possibility of ethical embroilments for Professor Slaoui, being a Big Pharma alum and all that, and working for President Trump, in the case of Dr. Desmond-Hellmann ethical compromise is not a mere possibility. She’s a full-fledged bio thug. Which may make her a good person to have around in the present pandemic environment. She recently expressed a few thoughts on the search for a COVID-19 vaccine, specifically, and her insights are valuable because the one thing we know about Dr. Desmond-Hellmann is that she doesn’t let sentiment get in the way of creating pharmaceuticals. But, as your mother told you, you still have to consider the source. So, like, a few more words about Sue.

         We pick up her background in a passage from A Nigger in Nursing, about the culture of racism and corruption at the University of California’s San Francisco campus, where a young Dr. Desmond-Hellmann served first as chief resident and a couple of decades later returned as chancellor. 

         “Her back story was easy to outline because Sue talked a lot about herself: If you spent any time on the university website you got a general idea of her career trajectory without even trying. Medical school in Las Vegas, a very successful residency in oncology and then teaching in San Francisco followed by two years in Uganda doing research that she portrayed as—and well may have been—a genuine effort to help. But which may also have been a first step in another career entirely, Big Pharma, making really big bucks might have been on her radar even in Africa,” Nigger tells us. “Upon return to the U.S. she and her husband, also a physician, worked in practice for a time in her chosen field, in the South, and then she went for the money, first at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Jersey and later at Genentech in South San Francisco. When she came back to UCSF as chancellor in 2010 she had just cashed in her Genentech stock and received $30 million, per press reports. Her husband was already independently wealthy, Hollywood money. Suddenly, Nicholas Hellmann and Susan Desmond-Hellmann were a S.F. power couple with the spotlight on her.”

          Or the Wikipedia version: “Returning to clinical research, Desmond-Hellmann became associate director of clinical cancer research at Bristol-Myers Squib Pharmaceutical Research Institute. While there, she was the project team leader for Taxol. In 1995 she joined Genentech as a clinical scientist; she was named chief medical officer the following year, and in 1999 became executive vice president of development and product operations. From March 2004 through April 2009 she was chief of product development, playing a role in the development of two of the first gene-targeted therapies for cancer, Avastin and Herceptin.” Susan Desmond-Hellmann is not a person who thinks of what you can’t do, like a lawyer—what is or is not permitted by law or by custom. She thinks of what you can do, physically, like an engineer or the scientist she is. That’s the source of her success, she has a wider view of possibilities than most people. That’s the source of her genius and is probably what attracted Bill Gates to her in the first place. It’s also what gets Sue into trouble.

         Ethical troubles began almost immediately after assuming office as chancellor of UCSF, on the imposing Mount Parnassus, in Outer Sunset, in Baghdad by the Bay. To set the scene.

         The New York Times reported that her University of California financial disclosure form for 2010, while Sue was serving as leader of the preeminent public healthcare university in the world—that includes a well-regarded, cutting edge cancer research operation, and an anti-tobacco institute, exclusively dedicated to digging dirt on cigarette companies. Sue’s disclosure included major holdings of the maker of Marlboro cigarettes. She explained to the Times that she had merely signed what her investment adviser placed in front of her, yet the financial disclosure was handwritten and her initials appeared beside corrections in the margins. An appalled murmur arose on Mount Parnassus, in Baghdad by the Bay. That was just Sue, you might say, and it was just the beginning. Also on her watch the federal government fined UCSF for a wide variety of inhumane conditions for lab animals. She would eventually be sued in federal court by the African-American who served as UCSF’s diversity coordinator, who said she fired him for speaking up about race issues at this traditionally white UC campus. When she was called out on her ties to industry she wrote and published a paper in a scientific journal in which she and UCSF’s then head of commercialization, neurologist Clay Johnston—now dean of the University of Texas Dell School of Medicine in Austin—said that there were not enough ties between academia and Big Pharma. In other words she doubled down.

        There’s a classic Sue story, told by former UC President Mark Yudof, who actually hired her to lead UCSF. No moral giant himself, Yudof nonetheless marveled over the audacity and impropriety of her management proposals, in an oral history given to a UC Berkeley researcher in 2018. You have to imagine the scene. It’s 2012 at a UC Regents meeting. In San Francisco, Chancellor Desmond-Hellmann is planning to ram through construction of a new campus in Mission Bay—including a Genentech Hall for Regents’ meetings—displacing a formerly minority neighborhood in the process and God knows how many low-income residents. But we digress. President Yudof picks up the narrative from there. 

        Press reports were that the Regents’ response to her new idea was icy but It wasn’t gentrification that upset them. Sue had decided she wanted to privatize the whole San Francisco campus. 

“One thing I’ve discovered in life,” Yudof told the Berkeley historian, “is you can spend a lot of time trying to move around the black boxes and get nowhere by saying the answer to our problems is in a restructuring of governance. [But] it’s in the [California] constitution, the governance of the University of California. You’ve got the speaker of the Assembly; you’ve got the California superintendent of public instruction; you’ve got the lieutenant governor on the board; you’ve got regents that are there. We’re not going to turn the world upside down and establish a new board for UCSF. If we were on a blank slate, maybe there could be movement in that direction. And we’re not a private university. Even though they’re only paying 5 percent of the bills, the taxpayers say, ‘Wait a minute, we built this place over all these years,’ and now you want to be free of what I call public accountability? So it just was not to be. Sue made some governance changes, which I think were all good, but at the end of the day — to be honest with you, I didn’t make many phone calls," Yudof said. “It was going nowhere. I told her that — the structural stuff. Everything else she was doing was really first-class, but I just couldn’t see how it would work. Every time someone says, ‘Let’s take one of our campuses private,’ I don’t know what that means. The taxpayers built a lot of the buildings; they built it over 100 years, 150 years. The legislature’s not going to do it. The people are going to vote for a constitutional amendment to set a campus free? I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time, but I also wasn’t going to campaign against it because I knew it would never happen.” That’s Sue again. In the end her academic career was done in by another media report, much like the one about her investment choices, this time in the Washington Post.

The story was about two Genentech drugs—Avastin and Lucentis—one that costs $50 and the other $2,000 a dose and both of which do the same job in preventing blindness from macular degeneration. So, like, the story was about Sue’s time as Genentech's head of product development, the five years right before she came to UCSF as chancellor, basically, and as the Post recalled, the extreme efforts she took to push the more expensive drug by misrepresenting the cheaper one.

“’When Lucentis did go on sale,’” the Post reported, “'Genentech’s blockbuster drug already had a competitor [Genentech’s already existing and cheaper cancer drug, Avastin, which works just as well for macular degeneration]. How could the company convince doctors and hospitals that Lucentis had any major advantage over Avastin? Over and over again [The Company] sought to discourage use of Avastin by raising concerns about its safety. They told doctors that Avastin was not approved by the FDA for use in the eye—Lucentis was. They reminded doctors that if the repackaging firms cutting Avastin into smaller doses were careless, infection could be introduced. And despite the lack of conclusive evidence on the point, they said that Avastin patients might suffer more side effects than Lucentis patients. Sometimes, senior FDA officials said, these warnings stretched the truth.’ The named culprit in the misrepresentation in which patients facing blindness were forced to pay $2000 a dose for a medication rather than $50 was one Susan Desmond-Hellmann—incumbent chancellor of the University of California San Francisco, although the authors of the Post story did not appear to know that when they published. 

“Genentech stopped selling Avastin to repackaging companies that cut the med into smaller doses,” the Post said, in order to force sales of the 4000% more expensive Lucentis. On Sue's watch. The result was that Genentech under Sue’s leadership pushed a med that was 40 times more expensive and no more effective because that math was better for her company. Which is Sue too. Despite being an innovator and thinking what no one else dares to think, including massively overcharging patients, she is oh so conventional in one respect. Sue likes money. Actually she spoke on that very issue, in a Zoom conference at UCSF in early June, after leaving Bill Gates’ employ. The conference was intended to address recent shocks to the American system of health care, the George Floyd murder and COVID—race, money and disease, in other words. And how things might change in the future? And here, at first, her wisdom was conventional.

“For me, I don’t think you can or should blow up the existing medical system,” she said, speaking for example of the important role of academic medicine. “I think that there are tools that one can use with existing infrastructure to drive more productive outcomes. I actually think that UCSF or Stanford in and of themselves are less an impediment than the number of doctors who go into expensive specialties. I think that is an impediment if you just say we don’t need that many surgeries of this, or interventions on that. Because if you don’t drive medicine that way—humans do what they’re incentivized to do. If you pay differently, people will go where the money is. So, the one thing I found at UCSF and at Genentech, less so at Gates Foundation, because we didn’t have that much money, but the money matters.” Where she really got interesting—innovative or anti-innovative, depending on your point of view—was the subject of vaccines and research on vaccines. Cue COVID-19. To set the scene.

As a Big Parma executive and research university chancellor, Sue was a big proponent of speed in studies and speeded-up approval of drugs by the federal government. Apparently no longer. Asked about the flood of unvetted research on the COVID virus, she said, in UCSF’s Zoom conference, “I think it’s mostly bad. And I’m surprised to hear me say that.” Again she referenced her time at Genentech. “One of the most important assets that a [drug] product developer has is confidence. When I was at Genentech, it was just, ‘Be sure about it,’" she said. “Not uncommonly we would use more time or more [test] patients to have more confidence. What I think is the downside to the speed that’s going on now—and you see it, you follow Twitter, it’s the wild west, and I’m not talking about crazy people,” she said, but instead established scientists. “The papers are coming out so fast that people are having to change things. The latest is the hydrochloroquine study. You do not want to have a bunch of retractions. So, I’m pretty negative about the early publications when people haven’t seen the source data, or just going too fast.” 

But she draws a distinction between publication and product development, where she’s more gung ho. “I think you can go very fast but you have to have a clear asterisk. So, it’s not uncommon in oncology and cancer medicine to say I’m getting an accelerated approval and people who are very sick and are going to die of cancer can get this medicine, while in parallel, we do a trial. And if that trial is negative the drug is gone because that asterisk is on there. There are ways with products that you can do that. Here is what I don’t know how to do. I don’t know how to do a vaccine approval—an accelerated approval—if three hundred and thirty million people are going to get it.” 

She returned to her favorite subject. 

Money

“So, now, I could make a case that you could do a vaccine, because there’s so much money. You have so many patients that you have a big big database, that you feel good about it, or you have a small safety database and you go to small groups of individuals who are at particularly high risk, and so you build your safety database. But for me the two things are confidence, number one, because once you screw up on confidence, it’s over.” Sue changed the Gateses but apparently the foundation has changed her too. Because she said her second concern is transparency, something she wasn’t known for before, on Mount Parnassus.

“The second thing is just clarity of communication. If this is an accelerated approval, if it’s conditional—if this is, ‘we’re not sure yet,’ tell people you’re not sure yet. People can go with that. But this aura of confidence, especially when you’re not confident yet, makes me very very concerned, especially with vaccines. I think with vaccines it has to be safe and effective unless you’re really clear about who you give the vaccine and then those people know how much you know about it.”

On the subject of a COVID 19 vaccine, presumably including the one being developed by her own Pfizer, “I think it’s great they’re going as fast as they are. This vaccine speed is truly unprecedented. And not being done sloppy, not being done bad, but when it’s ready for approval, just think, okay, you’re in charge of the vaccine program, you start Phase 3 [trials] in July, you go to December, you have six months of data, and the wrap-up of the patients in the trials, and in January you’re going to treat two hundred million patients with your vaccine? You’ve got to make sure you know enough.” Which turned out to be the case.

          “Here’s the thing,” Sue said during her Zoom comments at the Covid end-of-the-world conference on the Mount. “So, this is for most product developers. This is binary. If you had a cure for COVID 19, have at it—have a human challenge model. If you don’t have a cure—if you’re 25, if you’re 40, if you’re 15—I’m not going to challenge somebody when I don’t have a remedy for what I’m challenging them with. There’s a human challenge model for malaria, but we have drugs for malaria. My own belief is that the enthusiasm for a human challenge [model for COVID 19] kind of went up, and then it went away. And it may be because of that, because there’s just no cure.” She was asked on Zoom, by Dr. Robert Wachter, head of the Department of Medicine at UCSF—an institution where money is used as a reward, a tool and a cudgel—medicine can be a dirty business. 

           Dr. Wachter asked her about just paying test participants for taking the COVID-19 vaccine—for the danger incurred by being guinea pigs, and all.  

“You could make the argument, and you could pay them,” Sue said, “and make sure they really volunteered and all that. I don’t think it’s crazy that—let me be clear—I don’t think it’s crazy. I don’t think it’s crazy at all—and I [also] understand why people are avoiding it.” Sue's other recent gig has been Facebook, where she resigned from the board last year. For most of the last decade she's been the lead independent Facebook director which meant she was responsible for keeping Mark Zuckerberg & Company on the straight and narrow path of ethics. We know how that turned out. 

The point is that Sue has the moral development of a nematode and if she's concerned about the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, even by her own company Pfizer, how should that make the rest of us feel? 

Cat Mountain

If you were a certain kind of reporter at the Texas Capitol you knew in your heart of hearts that there was a shortcut to the front page. 

If for example you didn’t want to spend time looking at airplane flight logs, in order to see if a public official like State Comptroller of Public Accounts Bob Bullock was using state-owned aircraft for campaign purposes, which is illegal? Or if you didn't want to look at Mr. Bullock’s campaign expense accounts or try to turn his aides and get them to rat out the Big Guy—which was impossible without the threat of jail? Which was impossible even with the threat of jail, because that’s what the District Attorney had tried and none of Bullock’s people rolled over. 

There was another way that was faster, cheaper and sexier to get your byline on the front page. Not that that’s important—but maybe get a blowjob later, during a night out drinking, after putting the newspaper to bed. 

Which is important. 

My idea was to find the target of the D.A.'s investigation and try to sweat him. Or her. In other words in this example give Mr. Bullock the third degree. It made so much sense to me at the time that the only surprise was nobody thought of it before. Too late it became clear why nobody else had tried. The science was good, certainly. The theory was excellent. The practice was just a tad iffy. 

There is a preliminary question to answer. Do you know why cops are such assholes? Why they’re so obnoxious? Not because only assholes go into police work although that’s a good guess. But because the police want to piss you off intentionally when they’re talking to you. 

They want to see which way you jump—to see if you’ll make a mistake, to see if you “act guilty,” whatever that means to a white guy with a badge and gun. 

They do it by holding onto your driver’s license or passport for a couple of minutes longer than necessary or by acting like they don’t believe your answer whatever your answer may be. They do it by pursuing a line of inquiry past a logical end, in other words by being pricks. For most cops it's a kind of a job requirement, really. Sometimes you just have to make people sweat. 

My idea was that a reporter can achieve good results if he or she has a similar technique. It only takes practice. 

My idea which seemed like a good idea at the time was to intimidate the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, aka the Taxman. To get Mr. Bullock alone, at his house, sweat him a little, make it sound like the District Attorney’s investigation was coming to a head whether it was or not and see which way Mr. Bullock jumped. Not lie to him exactly because that would be unethical but somehow lead him to believe the noose was tightening. Get him to comment on his own indictment before the indictment was filed, that kind of thing. Not technically unethical but close enough to be fun.

It would give me a piece of the story and get me into print where my presence was so far lacking. This was technically a courthouse story because there was the possibility of criminal charges—my beat, my backyard, my hunting ground, you feel me? Key to my plan was D.A. Ronnie Earle and the key question to put to him was this, “Where does Bullock live?” 

The Comptroller’s home wasn’t in the Austin telephone directory. 

You weren’t going to find him in the pages under Corrupt State Officials or “Targets of the Travis County Grand Jury”. The word at the courthouse was that Bob Bullock, who made paranoia look like a reasonable state of mind even when nobody was after him, moved around a lot. He was married to a real estate agent which helped. D.A. Ronnie Earle would know where he bedded down though. Or Ronnie’s people would know. 

The D.A. kept on staff a couple of ex-police detectives who served as muscle and who did most of the legwork of the inquiries. Those guys would know. That was my theory. 

Ronnie’s people would've checked out Mr. Bullock’s house for signs of ill-gotten gain, maybe even served a search warrant, or two, just to rattle the big man, which was my idea too, to frighten Mr. Bullock and see which way he jumped. The D.A.'s people weren’t going to tell me where Bullock lived but Ronnie might, if it was done right, with the subtlety and style that had already, at that point in time, become hallmarks of this member of the Black Press. 

My level of anxiety about running a trap on the D.A., you may ask? 

Zero. 

Ronnie had pulled my strings often enough. It was time to make him dance.

First and foremost in order to keep his or her credibility the reporter of color has to show independence from “the authorities.” That we’re not mere pawns of The White Man. 

So, like, one day me and the Honorable Ronald Earle, Esq. were chatting in his office in the Travis County Courthouse about something entirely different and just, you know, real casual like, you know—my question to him was, like—like it was something just occurred to me and not the whole fucking purpose of calling his secretary Jan for an appointment in the first place. 

My question to Ronnie was something, like, “Hey, by the way, where does Bullock live?” 

And Ronnie replied, equally casually, like he wasn’t paying attention which he wasn’t. “Up on Cat Mountain,” he said. 

He didn’t raise that right index finger, either, to signal something in our conversation that couldn’t be used. In other words, it wasn't something off the record. Ronnie didn’t know the address—and he wasn’t going to call his investigator to find out. There was nothing to do but go look for myself. 

Which was cool, a little legwork, you feel me, sometimes that’s the nature of the job, actually, like tracking gazelle on the savannah used to be for my hunter-gatherer ancestors, on the Dark Continent back in the day. Before we were enslaved and brought in chains to this land, if one views history thru a critical race lens. This was instinctive for me. Sometimes you have to track your prey.

Although ambush is better. 

Still, not yet being that well-acquainted with River City and this being outside my usual sector of operations, which was mostly downtown, near the State Capitol, near the triangle formed by the Governor's Mansion, the Capitol and County Courthouse, actually, where me and Ronnie were talking in his office. My first thought was that Cat Mountain must be a real mountain, or at least a hill. 

But it was also a street, a dead-end street, north, northwest, not exactly Butt Fucking Egypt but pretty damn close. Up there in the beginnings of the growing white suburban wasteland. Almost—oh my God—Williamson County! 

Driving there, a sense of primordial dread filled my soul. 

This was a part of the White Homeland where only Caucasians ventured, not at all the kind of place where a black man or a Mexican wanted to be seen after dark. This occasion warranted an exception. Went to check it out, boots on the ground and all that, not to sound noble or anything. As the American-Statesman staff car rolled into The White Man's backyard the only comforting thought was that anyone encountered in this neighborhood would be fair game. And my luck held. There, in the fading light, parked in front of an inconspicuous house that did not signify wealth or power was a car that did both. A shiny white Cadillac with “State Official” license plates. Mrs. Bullock answered the door. 

This was wife number one, or two, who later did time as wife three or four? Can’t remember which, Bullock got around with the ladies and actually married one, named Amelia, twice. She was in real estate not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

Mrs. Bullock was a petite attractive woman with a cute haircut and a nice rack who looked at me, read my business card or whatever and gave me a last apprehensive glance before going to get her husband. In different circumstances we could have been friends. She didn’t warn me off explicitly although you could tell she wanted to say something. 

She left me standing in the doorway, actually, and in light of later events what she was doing could have been interpreted as offering a last chance for escape. Her facial expression as she stepped away was a sign reading “Trouble Ahead.” A moment later Mrs. Bullock returned to the door. Mr. Bullock was following. 

Bob Bullock was a little guy, trim, built wiry like a young Sinatra. The statue in the State History Museum that bears his name, up the street from the Capitol, is a pretty good likeness in proportion if not in detail. That night he smelled of booze which was also true to reputation, it was late enough that he had his first few shots after coming home from running the State of Texas, that part of my plan was working, yeah. My belief even at a tender age as a cub reporter was that you always have to have a plan so that you have something to blame later, other than yourself. You didn’t fuck up personally. The plan was just no good. Not appropriate to the circumstances or the circumstances changed. 

Bullock's eyes were red, on a 1 to 10 redness scale his were like 11, maybe 12. We didn’t shake hands. There was nothing to do but introduce myself, give him my rap and start trying to pull his chain. Luckily, fucking with public officials came to me pretty naturally from the very beginning of my career. The higher up they were the more natural it felt. 

And this guy was white, not to repeat myself, they all were white at the State Capitol at that time and mostly still are. But we digress. 

The weird thing, the only aspect of Mr. Bullock's demeanor that worried me inordinately, standing there in his doorway, not having been invited in, he never looked directly at me. 

Those red eyes were focused about shoulder-level and just to my left side. He interrupted me half-way through my rap about District Attorney Ronnie Earle and the Travis County Grand Jury. 

“Lucius,” Mr. Bullock said, kind of slow, but without any noticeable slurring or impediment to clear speech, “if you ever come to my house again I’ll shoot you.” 

What struck me at once was that it was an awkward moment socially. A death threat from your host inhibits so much conversation. 

There was no slurring, no drool, no hesitation, to his credit he didn’t shout or anything, Mr. Bullock just said “I'll shoot you” the same way he would have said, “No comment,” or “Pleased to meet you.” Or the way Willie Nelson greeted me so graciously at his door. Something that custom and/or good manners called for. The way he still wasn’t looking me in the eye was pretty spooky though, yeah, got to admit that. 

My options at that point were limited. My balls got a little tight and may have moved up an inch, or two, closer to the top of my scrotum. So they wouldn’t be in the way, like, if it came to a sprint? 

That's only natural when you have big balls like mine, you have to get them out of the way in case of emergency, cleared for action so to speak. Fear had nothing to do with it actually. It was more surprise. Did the most powerful official at the Capitol just threaten to shoot me? My reaction was purely analytical—not emotional at all—not to beat my own drum or anything. 

The math, the mental calculus, did not look good.

Bob Bullock was known to be a gun nut so if he didn't have a piece under his shirt, there was certainly one in the house. He was under the stress of a criminal investigation and he was also the most important public official in the Lone Star State including the governor. He controlled the State of Texas’s purse strings with an iron fist. 

Mr. Bullock was also famous for doing the unexpected. That was his trademark. He had just threatened to shoot a reporter after warning the aforesaid Negro to leave. 

The word at the Capitol was that Mr. Bullock himself did not hold racial animus, at least no more than any other Texas-born cracker-Democrat of his generation. He was a populist not a racist. But at that particular point in time, in bucolic River City, black people were still niggers in the original sense of the word. That was just a given, not considered real prejudice, not by anyone in power. 

If Mr. Bullock did shoot a nigger—under the right circumstances—he might be elected governor. Which was what he wanted most. So, like, a minute later the Austin American-Statesman staff car was rolling, at a pretty decent speed, down Cat Mountain which is a street and a hill, up near B.F.E. 

Over the years the story of my encounter with Mr. Bullock has gone through a few changes. Like, in bars, you have to jazz it up a little, especially if you want to make it good enough for somebody to buy the next round. The major alterations have been two additions to the narrative: The slow closing of my reporter’s notebook, completely unhurried—handing Mr. Bullock my business card and telling him to give me a call if he wanted to talk. That was one. And saying, real cool-like, “Thank you, Mr. Bullock, for your time.” None of which actually happened. Nothing else was actually said. 

The next sounds were my heels on his driveway and the car engine starting up. 

The better part of valor, and all that. But also the realization that the ploy hadn’t worked. 

Bob Bullock wasn’t the deputy commissioner of the Texas Department of Fucking Health. He wasn’t the assistant executive director at some screwed-up state agency. He ate those people for breakfast.

 This was El Patron himself who ran the State of Texas by controlling its finances. Mr. Bullock knew more about pulling people’s chains than my entire newsroom. He saw me coming a mile away, even through bloodshot eyes. 

There's something else. Even thugs have a code. That's the takeaway lesson here for the young reporter. 

My plan was to go to Cat Mountain to push Mr. Bullock's buttons. Instead he pushed mine. 

 

A Piece of the Pie

Working nights in a hospital the noise level can be surprisingly high. My preferred patient population is babies which means a lot of crying but the shrieks can usually be managed by a bottle of formula or the intervention of a boob. Lately my patients have all been adults in moderately bad shape and what they talk about at midnight and beyond—past the hour when most hospitals will give out sleeping pills, which is 2 a.m.? The conversation in the patient's room can be pretty wide-ranging, actually, and informative. Or not. Some things you don’t really want to hear, but other subjects are more entertaining. 

There was a lady a little while ago with breast cancer that had gone away and come back. She said that her history teacher back in the day at Fulmore Middle School in Austin was future Governor Ann Richards. “She was really funny,” this lady said, the only time the patient smiled during our interactions over the course of one very long weekend. Otherwise she had a flat affect and wouldn’t take any pain medication which can be a bad sign, even refusing the kind of pills that usually cheer people up. 

Another patient about the same time who had a stroke mentioned his roots in Texas went back to revolutionary days and included slaveholders. 

You hear a lot of family history in a hospital because there may not be much future for the people talking or they think not and also because—one supposes—some folks, seeing the end, whether it’s looming or not, are trying to come to terms with their forbearers. In order to figure out their own place in the parade of life. It was the second patient more than the first who helped me to come to terms with my lineage as an African American in this Southern state. 

My people or my father’s people come from Washington County, county seat Brenham, in the Brazos River valley, on the road between Houston and Austin. My great-grandfather was also named Lucius and was born a slave in Austin County next door to Washington County where he was sold or moved and was later sentenced to prison for murder, twenty years after Emancipation. That's all the background you need. 

My grandfather and father—Lucius II and Lucius III, respectively—were born in Brenham and in Houston, respectively, but not in any kind of bondage and were not destined to do fieldwork. Everyone on my father’s side of the family turned to crime, actually, a step up from slavery, actually. My own preference today would be to say that they were “economic freedom fighters” or “proprietary insurgents against The Man,” something like that, in the modern context of the civil rights struggle, which includes discussion of money and lately reparations. They were in crime for the money. 

In their own way my ancestors did not accept white privilege, to use the terminology of our present more enlightened debate. My family history as slaves doesn’t obsess me or anything but every time the name Brenham pops up, my ears prick up. 

Antebellum Texas was a long time ago and most of my day today is more concerned with what white people are up to now. Which you do have to continue to watch out for, here in the Lone Star State. Because Caucasians seem to have been caught once or twice but not stopped trying, you feel me? 

Through the years however, half-attentively—the members of my family have collected quite a little dossier on Brenham, our former hometown, and the content of the file is not good. It has nothing to do with the high prices at the bed-and-breakfasts, in picturesque Washington-on-the-Brazos, or even the recent listeria scare at Blue Bell Ice Cream which is manufactured there and that Brenham is best known for today. Not to be a hypocrite either, Dutch Chocolate and the occasional spoonful of Rocky Road have passed my lips. 

There will be no suggestion of BDS (boycott, divestiture and sanction, like in the Middle East) but there’s no product endorsement of anything that comes out of Washington County either. 

Anyway this guy—the patient with the stroke—added to my understanding of Brenham’s pre-ice cream economy and also explained something from a book of the period that had perplexed me back in the day. He said that the Brazos River valley was cotton country, the original Texas plantation economy, and what made the state part of Dixie so to speak. Don’t know if that’s totally true but it makes a certain sense, being fertile river bottom land and all.

Tenting on the Plains was written by Libby Custer—wife of George Armstrong Custer, who at the time of Libby's writing had just had his fateful final encounter with the Sioux Nation. General Custer was military governor in Texas immediately after the Civil War and Libby wrote that Union officers arriving in Texas for occupation duty after the Civil War usually landed at Galveston, by steamboat from New Orleans, and took a train to Brenham, where the tracks ended, and were met by a string of horses for the ride to Austin. 

That’s because apparently there was only one rail line at the time west of the Mississippi, the one between Galveston and Brenham. That’s the story we are told. And the railroad carried cotton from the plantations to the port to be shipped abroad. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The economy was what it was, its best-known product was called King Cotton for a reason. Mother’s family was from Galveston, by the way. She was born during Jim Crow, her grandfather arrived from Jamaica to work on the docks a little after the Custers arrived with another aim, in post-bellum Texas, to make a better life. Cotton endured even if the Confederacy did not. So, like, it was almost as if the most famous agricultural product of the South brought together the two sides of a black family—in the sheets, presumably fine Texas cotton—and on the docks. My belief is that slavery and Jim Crow and even discrimination today has never been about skin color. It’s all been about money. 

My feeling about Galveston is that it’s a great town. My forbearers were paid for their labor on the dock, however little that may have been, and my attitude is kind of, like, “Brenham bad, Galveston good,” which is not a very sophisticated view but there it is. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston awarded my degree which is also a big plus on the Galveston side because it relates to earning a paycheck, our subject here. During the time of my studies the only prejudice in Galveston was the B.O.I. vs. not B.O.I. distinction—"Born on the Island,” or not. Which people do hold against you if you weren’t born on the right end of the Houston causeway. But has nothing to do with skin color. 

Whereas Brenham—you couldn’t pay me to spend the night there, so we’ll never know. Or you could pay me which is what this is about. 

Years ago a famous Galveston resident named Schwartz, who was state senator, and Jewish, and B.O.I., said that all modern relationships on Galveston Island are based upon who your family sheltered with during the great 1900 hurricane, that killed at least 6,000 people, still the largest single natural disaster in American history. During the storm you stayed with whoever had a house with strong walls or a foundation above waterline, again, irrespective of race. Brenham’s great disaster on the other hand was a fire, and it was set intentionally, not an act of nature or an act of God although one likes to think the Supreme Being, looking down, was smiling. 

1866 right after the Civil War and Yankee troops of the army of occupation got drunk one night and torched the town. The Washington County Historical Society or whoever makes a big deal about the fire. Personally though this fire—or the fact that there was a fire—which burned down the whole town or most of the town—is totally okay with me. 

My view of the state’s history is that there wasn’t enough burning, actually, either during the Civil War or immediately thereafter. How can you reconstruct—as in Reconstruction—if things haven’t been destroyed in the first place? Fire disinfects and cleanses, not to be puritanical or anything. A little more flame and ash would have been healthier for the state, actually, that’s my unsolicited professional opinion now. But in Texas only Brenham got the full cure. 

And then there's the money. Washington County State Bank was the oldest ongoing financial concern in Texas until a few years ago when it was bought by a holding company. If my ancestors’ wages, that they never received as slaves, had been invested at even 2 percent, my nights now would not be spent changing diapers/wiping drool on babies/adults. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s honorable work, you hear some interesting things as you slather on the butt cream. But there are better ways to spend one’s evenings than wiping front to back. That is my point. 

Btw, Brenham has always had, one way or another—using slave labor or, today, selling ice cream—a pretty vibrant little economy.

 “Despite a brief reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” the Handbook of Texas informs us, “merchandising, marketing, and processing industries enabled the town to preserve its position as a regional economic center between 1910 and the 1950s.” 

Happily today in its post-Klan incarnation Brenham continues to make a buck. Anytime events leave me down and depressed—opening Libby Custer’s book and reading about the Union Army crossing the Sabine River cheers me up. Were the Union troops carrying torches? One would think so. Happily there was a price for being on the wrong side of human rights. Even if you got a county or a school named after you later. 

A footnote: General John Bell Hood for example was the most prominent of the Lone Star rebel commanders and namesake of what was Fort Hood and Hood County, Texas. George Custer fell into conversation with the defeated Confederate on the boat to New Orleans just after the Civil War ended, they were both West Point men it seems. Old college ties and all that, there was no hostility between the two. Libby noted in her journal however that General Hood was a poor sight to see, all shot to hell. He had lost an arm in battle—and even worse he had lost the battle for Atlanta and his reputation was in tatters. As a rule, Texans don’t care how you win but you do have to win and General Hood had not. He got his comeuppance, in other words, not to be puritanical, just as George Custer would get his comeuppance in Dakota at the hands of the Sioux. Both white men making the wrong choice about white privilege, you could say. So, like—everybody gets taken care of eventually, by history or by life. 

Generally, historical disputes about people’s reputations only elicit a big yawn from me. Especially at four o’clock in the morning, making rounds with a package of Pull-Up diapers. The Rebels all got the cure we all get eventually. They were proven wrong by a change in values or by the unending irrelevancy of being dead. But the land, especially this land, that’s another thing. Texas never got the full cure. Except Brenham. And there, like my lady patient who never smiled in the hospital, the cancer came back. 

Brenham is about 25 miles from Hempstead in Waller County where Sandra Bland just hanged herself in a jail cell. Waller County borders Washington County, my ancestral home. The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland for, basically, being black and talking back to a white man, was a newbie with the Texas Highway Patrol. His prior job was as an “ingredients supervisor” at Blue Bell ice cream factory in picturesque Brenham, not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

My favorite Blue Bell flavor is Cookies n’ Cream, btw, and my theory of race relations is kind of like one of those pints of ice cream, dark chunks of rich chocolate in what otherwise would be plain vanilla? 

Apply any heat whatsoever and there’s a meltdown. 

Instead of delicious dark sweetener, some people get treated like bacteria in the vat, which is what happened to Sandra Bland. Of course that doesn’t account for all the other people of color in Texas, there are other flavors, so to speak. My theory has not been completely worked out, you have to give me a little latitude here. Regarding Brenham however the facts are incontrovertible—there's absolutely no fucking doubt. There’s just something about the town. 

You may say that you can’t stereotype an entire geographic area of a huge state like Texas but if you could, Washington County would be the place to start. That would be my whole point, actually. 

Chief Manley Takes the Witness Stand

There’s a warning among African-Americans about visiting the Texas capital city. “Come to Austin on vacation,” some peeps say, “leave on probation.” Or don’t leave at all because you’ve been shot by the pigs. Or leave in the sheriff’s van headed to state prison which is also a highly-likely outcome for people of color in the World Capital of Live Music. 

Statistics just released by the Department of Criminal Justice show Travis County—of which our bucolic city is the progressive county seat? Travis County leads Texas’ major urban areas in percentage of the minority population sent to prison even though the capital city’s relative black and Latino population is lower than in Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth or San Antonio. For such a progressive place with such a high-minded view of itself, justice outcomes here are an embarrassment. A lot of fingers have been pointed recently to explain these law & order discrepancies: at prosecutors, at the courts and at a predatory probation office. But nowhere more than at the police—the pigs, colloquially—alleged officers of the law. 

The actual dynamics of policing a racist police force were just explored in some detail in a Travis County courtroom as two SWAT guys faced charges of excessive force in what is said to have been the first civil rights trial of a police officer in Hill Country history. From the start there wasn’t much doubt about the verdict but as a black man my feeling was sort of like sitting down to watch a much-anticipated new movie—or turning up the volume on a long hoped-for album. This should be good. 

There’s an old photograph in my memory of the civil rights era, which you may have seen as well—of a backwoods Southern sheriff, back in the day—on trial for the deaths of Freedom Riders. That was apparently the background to the picture. A black guy and a Jewish guy were the vics, it's a famous case of the FBI's “Mississippi Burning” era: A cracker sheriff grinning and chewing tobacco, like he was having a good time at his own trial, because he knew he would be acquitted. For me seeing the Mississippi photo always brought on indignation—until suddenly, in the 299^th Travis County District Court, Honorable Karen Sage presiding—the enjoyable prospect of a civil rights trial became clear, even if you knew from the beginning what the verdict would be. Chewing tobacco is not my thing. Instead, for a couple of days in early December my enjoyment was the discomfort of two white police officers, not to be mean-spirited. 

The original plan was to sit in the front row, stretch my feet out to watch a spectacle. Only popcorn would be missing because you can’t eat in court, you know? So, like, the details of the charges against these two SWAT idiots were not extraordinary by any means. Basically the case involved two white officers. A black suspect. Unnecessary use of a Taser. Faked documentation, stop me if you’ve heard this before. “Overtime” was probably the single most spoken word in the courtroom because it’s probably the most common expression in the local public safety vocabulary—in this city at least—where paying firefighters and feeding the pigs is like a quarter of the budget, the highest-paid police force in Texas, actually. 

So, like, the two SWAT idiots on trial were working overtime and allegedly on regular patrol on the night in question, early last year, when they stunned a black guy who had already submitted to their command to kneel. So. Like, stop me if you’ve heard that before, either. The defendants were Officers Pfaff and Petraitis—"P&P” as they were called by prosecutors outside the courtroom—or Peepee which was my own preference. One P was a little guy with a shaved head and the other one was beefy with a red face. At least one of the P's had capped a suspect or two in the past as a sniper employed by the City of Austin. To the degree that Peepee's defense was that they were being singled out and did nothing that any other cop in town has not done, or was not doing on that mild morning in December as the trial began—you could feel a certain sympathy for them because it was probably true. This is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Peepee just drew the short straw and got arrested by the D.A. They were caught when prosecutors were actually watching. The new D.A. has said the old days are over. 

The trial audience was, hmmm, pretty much what you would expect. The testosterone level was near-toxic. Although prosecutors have denied the existence of a blue wall, as it has been called elsewhere—in Chicago for example—of silence and oppression on the police force, the audience for Peepee’s trial was made up almost exclusively off-duty cops whose whole demeanor spelled pig, not to be mean-spirited again. Almost exclusively white males who looked like they had spent, growing up, too much time in the gym and not enough in the library. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because the jury was pretty fucking suspect too. From the concerned black male perspective: A sprinkling of minorities but, critically, three or four young white guys with beards, like the faces you see so frequently on our city streets today. Originally from Portland or Seattle or some other high tech locale probably on the West Coast and who in an earlier generation might have been long-haired liberals but today are just as likely to side with the cops. Not that there's anything wrong with that, either. Tech bros. The kind of guys who served in Iraq or play that game online. 

There was also a white chick in the front row of the jury box, blond with pearl earrings—you know the type, kind of hot actually, in a milfy way. Not to be racist or sexist or anything but she looked like she did good deeds. And she was paying close attention too, which is a good thing. She did not appear to be particularly Negro-friendly though, you never know, again, the outcome of the trial was assured regardless of this chick’s membership in Junior League. It only takes one vote to walk and Peepee had that from the beginning. With the verdict a foregone conclusion, that did not mean the trial was a wasted endeavor on the part of District Attorney Moore. The new D.A.’s new approach has been complemented by smart work at City Hall. In the new Police Association contract the pigs were given more money in exchange for greater scrutiny. The carrot and the stick, you could say, and in Judge Sage’s court it was the stick being applied. In the Mississippi Burning photo the sheriff looked oversized and arrogant but Peepee looked small and frightened. 

 It was interesting for example that the abuse Peepee was charged with perpetrating took place not far from the courthouse where they were being tried, in an open area near the old Brackenridge Hospital site that the mayor now calls the “Innovation Zone” and is designated for high-tech healthcare entrepreneurship. Allied with the University of Texas’s new Dell Medical School. The two SWAT idiots just happened to single out a black guy. That fits into a continuing black narrative, the belief that the police are only doing what City Hall wants, clearing inner city neighborhoods for newly-arrived techie whites. In that narrative the Negro who got zapped by the Taser got zapped because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because he didn’t kneel when he was ordered to. He was supposed to have made way already for a hypothetically-white, preferably-young female medical researcher out with her dog. 

As gentrification—backed by police action—police pressure let’s call it—has progressed, the mayor has spoken of a “right of return” for minorities forced from their homes, but in order to return you have to leave first. It’s something that Steve Adler the human being will likely regret in retrospect but Mayor Adler the developer's friend is promoting now. City Hall has endorsed a kind of reverse-Soweto approach here, in the Live Music Capital of the World, instead of keeping African-Americans in a defined area—a la apartheid—the city has tried to move us out. That includes clearing the Innovation Zone. The mayor and the members of the Chamber of Commerce aren’t bad people, it’s just that the easiest way they know to make money is through real estate. The economy has to keep growing. They’re greedy, in other words, just like pigs. 

One can only hope that Peepee's defense depleted the union’s defense fund in the process. It’s noteworthy now that our two last police chiefs have both turned on their own officers, Chief Art Acevedo who recently decamped for Houston, after a decade in River City, was famously recorded in show-up ripping his own people a new asshole. The Chief himself was also widely believed in the Department to be responsible for a series of leaks to the daily newspaper, against his own guys and girls. “You notice,” a police lieutenant said to me just the other day, speaking of the American-Statesman’s scoops on pigs-gone-wild, “that the stories stopped when Acevedo left.” Chief Acevedo saw APD with the skeptical eye of an officer whose career was spent in internal affairs, in the California Highway Patrol. He already knew what bad cops looked like before he arrived. His reaction against what he saw in Austin seemed visceral while new Chief Brian Manley’s appearance in court seemed more calculated. He agreed to testify against Peepee. However it came about it was still welcomed.  

Other testimony during Peepee's trial was actually encouraging. The original patrol idiot on scene was a bicycle cop who arrived before the two SWAT idiots. He admitted under cross examination that the only reason he was testifying against his brother officers was that prosecutors told him that if he did not, he would be charged with faking reports of the incident, after he was caught (by video) lying in his written narrative. The bike officer raised what has become a legitimate question, in our digitally-obsessed world, first asked a couple of years ago by Police Association President Ken Casaday, who is not an idiot but who has only the interests of his membership at heart. The issue of what “really” happens and what video shows happening. It's an almost existential question. Casaday's idea being to allow officers to see their film before writing reports. 

There was one curious thing about Peepee’s trial, in my view, as a moderate black man, although it was not anything coming from the bench or at the defense table. Instead it was Peepee's audience, the gallery, the pigs themselves, colloquially-speaking. You couldn’t help but notice a violation of courtroom decorum, actually. So, like, one off-duty officer was sitting in the front row in plain sight of the bailiff and presumably the judge—during testimony—gradually peeling back the wrapper of a candy bar and chowing down. He kept on eating while also taking sips from a bottle of water. My recollection is that he even had the bottle on the rail in front of him at one point. It was hard to miss, in a supposedly non-drinking no-food courtroom, and one of the guys next to me even had a coffee cup on the bench beside him. That may not seem extraordinary behavior unless you spend any time in courtrooms, where it is. These pigs were texting and you also heard the occasional beep of an incoming message in the gallery. At least one phone rang, a subdued chime that was nonetheless noticeable in a hushed courtroom. Normally the bailiff would be moving you out the door. But the judge didn’t seem to mind and during breaks the bailiff was deferential to PD in the audience, like the court and the Police Association were all one big happy family which they are, actually. 

Whereas during an ordinary trial—when this gallery is not full of cops, and there are only the unfortunates and the losers/thugs who make their way through the county criminal justice system? So, like, an average day at any other time in Judge Sage’s courtroom for example—the rules are posted on the door, aren’t they? No eating, no drinking or cellphone use. Like that. And the rules are enforced for anyone else. Usually. Except for the damn pigs.

Ordinarily Her Honor would have gone off like a bomb or the courtroom deputy would have escorted someone to the door. But for los puercos in the courtroom it was like there were no rules. It’s like that out on the street too.