Letters from Texas

(this is another older piece sometimes subtitled "Letters From Across the Cultural Divide)

I’m writing fromTexas, Houston to be more exact and there is a glimmer of understanding and some sort of insight as to how George W Bush was foisted upon us… It’s a strange state both in a physical sense as well as a mental state--a state of being and non being. Texas is an enigma and understanding that will bring one closer to understanding how this current administration has perhaps come to and stayed in power. Take a minute to look at Texas origins from it’s dubious standoff at the Alamo, cowboy roots and boom days as a one time major oil producer. Long before liberals vented about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Texans gave us the Alamo. Just who were these heroic Texans fighting off at the Alamo? Revisionist history offers us multiple perspectives but it seems the land was somewhat dishonestly "liberated" from Mexico...and it's been one scam after another ever since.

I pick up the Houston Chronicle and it reads like a cross between Pulp Fiction and the National Enquirer. I’m not quite sure if it’s a gritty violent city, fraying around the edges or if this is the ultimate in yellow journalism. This much I do know: The city has a hard scrabble feel to it with tar paper shacks and rundown homes ringing the downtown area, reminiscent of tobacco alley; and the oil fields represented a boom and bust mentality whose collapse seems to have taken the heart out of the city. Each day there is another story of malfeasance, corruption and incompetence making headlines; and each day a jaded population, a population seemingly without hope whose dreams have been dashed and are as dry as the abandoned wells that dot the landscape, shrugs each story off with a naive belief in a benevolent god or a sense and sigh of resignation because these are the same scoundrels in the news that sold snake oil elixirs and rotgut whiskey to indigenous peoples generations earlier. The fraud, the shady dealings and subsequent collapse of Enron is only one of many equally sordid tales.

This mornings paper opens with a story about air quality in the region which is the ultimate oxymoron: on bad days the air clings to you like a cellophane wrap, acrid and stinging. This is not the photochemical smog of the Los Angeles Basin; it is tainted with benzene and 1,3-butadiene and the stench of refinery operations. The poor, the elderly and the disenfranchised live closest and downwind of the refineries. Nor is this cowboy country although a few play at pretend cowboy. This is oil country turned suburban with a few roughnecks here and there. Thick stands of Southern pine and Oaks once dotted what is --or once was-almost bayou country. It seems there is water in every low spot and gully with tremendous storms sweeping in off the gulf. The water is still there but the trees are being cleared and the land is denuded. "Cleared" is not the right word--slash and burn is a more apt description...or defoliated in something that resembles that resembles the widespread use of Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. This is another wonderful irony: subdivisions have names like the Woodlands and street names such as Camden Forest but every tree in sight has been mowed down to build... Each new subdivision is an ugly scar on the land--a gaping clear cut and a wound that won't heal; and they spring up like a pestilence.

There is a downtown and this is one of the largest cities in the United States but it seems more a monument to the people that sell concrete, to the contractors that could influence planners and to some of the worst traffic engineering I have ever seen. Towering overpasses lead to nowhere and then turn back, looping on themselves in a eerie aerial ballet. A mile and a half later I am still on some sort of on ramp and watching traffic move in every which direction except for the one that seems most logical. Of course if you sell concrete or profit from this sort of boondoggle, it is starkly beautiful and shoppers are trapped in some sort of retail purgatory as they attempt to get from mall to mall. One has to experience this in person to appreciate the unearthly and haunting beauty of this dance of poured concrete. Pillars loom pale white and today the air has been cleansed by a squall, creating and redefining this sculptural tableau. A passing thought-is there any way I can capture the surreal-ness of this on film without creating a traffic nightmare or spending the night in jail? As I drive--nay hurtle--down the roadway I am also distracted by an older section of freeway propped up on rusted metal girders and I-beams and I find myself thinking that maybe this isn't all that much older--that the condition of this section of the roadway might have something to do with the air quality...

This is not to say there aren't moments of beauty and redemption. Wildflowers pop up where they can. I think they are Black-eyed Susans, Milkmaids and Indian Baintbrush. I'm not sure what this area might have looked like before the Anglos began their bloodletting on the landscape--perhaps bayou country with trees dripping Spanish Moss painted cool gray and sage but the few flowers showing themselves speak to me of hope, optimism and an enduring nature. Sometimes I catch myself fast forwarding my thought processes and wondering how quickly Mother Nature might reclaim this land and accordingly I find a bright spot amidst the urban decay and detritus of civilization. Decay provides an opening for rebirth and regeneration. Decay in whatever form is compost for some other--and hopefully higher purpose. The homeless sleeping under freeway overpasses only re-affirm my dire interpretation of the direction we are headed in politically and as a society. We have lost our way and our will. However, for every ill-mannered, racist and unemployed oil field worker amidst the grit and squalor and the maze of tract homes I also meet some of the warmest, friendliest people albeit somewhat "simple" according to my jaded West Coast and somewhat "urbane" world view. They find solace in their religion and embody a generosity of spirit that I see in few other places.

This is important because I am here to help my mother and stepfather through a bout with cancer and a knee replacement. My mothers artificial knee will work as designed although it is a relatively difficult and painful procedure but the prognosis for the stepfather is grim--at best. He has smoked for 50 years and sometimes as many as 3 packs a day and cancer coursed through his body undetected until recently. It would have perhaps remained undetected until the bitter end had he not started getting lost in the most unlikely places. His wife--my mother-- was living in dread fear of Alzhiemers or dementia and insisted that he be tested and tested again. Routine physicals had failed to turn up anything until a CAT scan revealed an enormous tumour on the brain at which point the family physician began looking at other parts of his body in an effort to see if the cancer had spread or where it had started. 3 packs a day...was there ever any question?

The cancer ward is an experience in itself. At first glance it seems to be overflowing with bodies ravaged by tobacco. Gravelly voices betray a lifetime of smoking although the oxygen bottles and wheezing might provide a clue as well... Meanwhile it's too late to experience regret or remorse. We all were invincible in our youth and at that age there is little wisdom we can offer until each of us comes face to face with our own mortality. Accordingly there is an atmosphere of resignation lit around the edges with the faintest rays of hope. There is an easy grace to the room and an aura of peace. They have gambled with fate and their lives, challenged medical science, tested actuarial tables and apparently--have lost. Therefore the patients in the clinic, for the most part accept their role in their own abbreviated lives.

The people in the clinic fascinate me. Some of it is morbid curiosity. I want to hear their stories in all their gory details and in a bizarre homage to Van Gogh, I also want to see their scars. I want to tell their stories and despite the fact that it seems most Texans are permanently attached to a cigarette, there are other patients with other types of cancer. The skin cancers and the brain cancers seem to shout out "Look at me--if you can..." The scars from repeated surgeries leave a road map of wasted lives, devastation and struggle sometimes tattooed across the skull or face. I can't help but admire these peoples bravery, facing a relentless adversary that if left unchecked will slowly eat away at them. God help the vain and the shallow whose measure of their net worth or the worth of another is only skin deep. The scars also tell a story of incredible pain--and in some cases--of more to come. There are two men missing what seems to my untrained eye enormous “chunks” of their heads. Bright pink and purple scars outline the missing portions and the top of one mans head reads like a badly done topographical model: “This depression is where the artificial lake will go-- behind the golf course and country club...”and for a split second I wonder what it is like to be them. I have had a hard enough time just accepting the fact that I am now “middle aged”. Repeat after me: “I want to live so badly that I am willing to have enormous sections of my body slowly carved away.”...

Most of the time I THINK I feel their pain but of course it is so much easier to resign yourself to someone else’s fate. It is the youngest women in the clinic that tweak the edges of empathy and pull at the heart strings that hurt me the most though. I am sorry to be so blunt and even selfish but we aged individuals have for the most part led good lives--or at least had the opportunity. My own life has not been lived according to the mantra of “What if?” or “I should have...” and accordingly I personally have few regrets. My death, whenever and however it comes, is another adventure in a life that has been what an older generation referred to as an “E ticket”--a wild ride. Meanwhile there is a young woman, a very attractive brunette with doe like eyes and a head of thick hair and it hurts to even acknowledge her. Her face, her countenance is both radiant and pained, even annoyed but it is the hurt and the confusion in her eyes that is so hard to bear. Every patient except perhaps for the heavy smokers will ask at one point “Why me?” and the answer is and will always be ”Why not?” but I cannot be so jaded and callous as to tell her this. Somehow I want to take the hurt and the confusion away but I am not sure that I have the tools or the skills, much less the emotional strength.

Smoking itself fascinates me as I catch myself wondering about addiction and self destructive behavior. Pardon my bias but you--smoker-- stink and it's the bitter smell of stale ashtrays while the walls are sticky with layers of tar and nicotine. It's the stench of last night and countless other nights overflowing the ashtray; butts sitting in an equally stale drink now tea colored. Can you taste food anymore or are your tastebuds completely gone? This is important only to me: in the pursuit of my own very hedonistic life I treasure texture and taste. Just the same, I think I know what it is to self medicate and to struggle with addiction so I keep my opinions to myself; and I can't help but stare at the patient disconnecting the oxygen bottle to sneak a quick cigarette. It's a prop, a security blanket, a nervous habit and a fix that extracts a heavy toll.

There is a young waitress, too young--working in a sad cafe, the kind of place that no matter how hard they try the food will always be rubbery and most of the booths will sit empty. Everything about her shouts out dysfunction--not that it's a badge people wear; and unleashing my prejudices it's not hard to imagine her pregnant with her fourth child all too soon. She too has a look in her eyes --pleading, wanting someone--me perhaps to take her away from this place. Were I less ethical I would perhaps prey upon that vulnerability but it is her mouth that diverts my attention. It has been a long time since I have seen teeth that tobacco stained and crooked-- and it seems so out of place in this day and age. I can't get that out of my head and this image, this theme replays itself--that of an angel fallen from grace, an angel descended from Applalachia doomed to a meager existence in a trailer park or manufactured home.



So now I am flying back to Texas again-- this time to bury my stepfather. Delicious irony that I am on a flight that sometimes seems right out of the twilight zone. At any minute I expect to see a short Mayan woman boarding the plane with a wooden cage full of chickens. No smoking is allowed in the friendly skies of the imagination but we make exception for the practice of Santeria and the bathrooms will be filled with milagros... Standing next to me is a Diane Feinstien (Californias fossilized senior senator) look alike and if her hair was pulled back any tighter I think her forehead would tear. I'm not sure if that look on her face is grim determination or years of bible belt upbringing... but I enjoy the spectacle of passing bodies further refining my lifelong study of body types and body language --and making up stories to fill in whatever blanks. Earlier, at the coffee counter was a “princess wanna-be“. She oozed refinement, breeding even and perhaps even a priviledged background ,but her posture, her slouch tells me her lot in life has not been easy. Maybe she is just self conscious about her breasts-- which she seems to be trying to hide...

Once I am on the plane I inventory the crew out of habit. It's been a while but here is the first stewardess I've seen that would actually qualify as attractive. Her anorexic co worker, however apparently had a bit part in the remake of the "Night of the Living Dead". The pancake make-up and the harsh light of high elevations does not improve her look. Meanwhile the pretty one even smiles. Does that mean we have crossed into some sort of international airspace where happiness is not determined by capricious boundaries such as red state blue state? Interestingly enough my own obsession with breasts draws my attention to the fact that the zombie stewardess doesn't have any breasts either-- and I spiral away, lost in thought and debating with myself which came first: the chicken or the egg? Earlier in the lobby something --someone-- annoyed me and I let loose. I let loose, as in releasing a gaseous flatulent cloud hoping to foul the airspace of whatever it was that annoyed me --or whomever’s--only to realize that the most stunning, attractively put together woman is walking behind me. "Put together" hints at my own misgivings: she could very well add new meanings to “high maintenance". I am momentarily embarrassed, but in doing a quick reality check, I remember that at my age I am invisible to women of her age. Just the same, I look for a dog or a “more senior” citizen to pin the blame on... and I have just added another dimension to “passive aggressive“.