My name is George Palmer and my interest is insults. When I mentioned this to my wife on the day we met (she admitted later she disliked me at first) she said, “How come your parents didn’t have any children?”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s an insult,” said Jean. “Don’t you get it?”
Lady, you have a fine personality, I thought, but not for a human being.
Actually, my field is insult strategies – social codes by which one group of people distinguishes itself at the expense of another. In Chaucer’s day, for example, peasants told long humorous tales ridiculing landowners and lords. One of the most popular stories concerns a peasant commanded by an ogre to put his sheep to pasture. The peasant feigns stupidity and, by cutting off the sheep’s tails and planting them in a field (as though the animals were head down in the dirt), pretends to bury the ogre’s herd in the ground. The ogre believes his sheep have been slaughtered; the peasant sells the herd at market. With similar tricks he destroys the ogre’s property, rapes the ogre’s wife, and mutilates the monster himself. I told Jean, “I’ve got a good bedtime story in case we decide to have kids.”
I’m rich. Oil money. Something Jean doesn’t joke about. In 1941 my father and an Irish pal of his founded Ferguson-Palmer Oil in Midland-Odessa. Thirty thousand acres, wells producing three hundred to twelve thousand barrels a day. In ’52 my father left exploration, bought the company’s refineries, and moved to Houston where I was born. Our home was dominated by a ceiling-to-floor aquarium. A dark hallway led from the copper-paneled kitchen into a vast room, gently curved, the walls of which were made of three-inch glass. Muted blue light, languorous plants, soft living petals of purple and green. In recreating the Permian Period, when West Texas’s major oil deposits formed, my father installed plastic brachiopods inside the tank and surrounded them with bass, catfish, rainbow trout. The room was his showpiece, his refuge from lawyers and accountants. When my parents were in bed I’d tiptoe down the hall, settle on a blanket in the flashing blue light, and let stripes of silver, orange and pink lull me to sleep.
As I watched the refinery workers from my father’s office, my early awareness of insults grew. In front of the window he’d placed a bare table, a fence between him and the poisonous spires below. As a kid I crawled beneath the table, pressed my nose to the glass, and saw the men in hard hats stuck like spiders among the Xs, Rs, and Os of the pipes. One would raise his fist, another grab his crotch. Bare asses were proffered. Shouting, shooting the finger. One afternoon I noticed a young Chicano slapping the left side of his face with the palm of his right hand. The gesture, meaningless to me, was having an extraordinary effect on another worker, who danced precariously on a catwalk thirty feet aboveground and threw his lunch sack into the air with rage. Years later I learned that the cara dura, indicating cheekiness or undue provocation, was a common put-down among Latins.
In thirty-two years of production, Palmer Refining logged over a hundred and seventy-five thousand Man–Safe Hours. “Our hydrocrackers are as tight as battleships,” my father told me. Each section of the plant, roughly three hundred square meters of intersecting pipe, was color-coded according to steps in the refining process (red meant distilling, yellow purifying, etc.). State law required seven fireplugs painted the appropriate color in each section. Sulfur and carbon, concentrated invisibly in the air, chipped holes in the parking lot, the workers’ skin, and the paint, which had to be reapplied to the plugs every sixteen days: my first summer job. In my hard hat and jeans, turning orange, red, then blue, I inhaled Lucite and steam until my nose ached. At the end of the day the workers bought me Lone Star longnecks and cold ham sandwiches. In the smoke and dusky light of the bar they reveled in being offensive. Their leathery arms snapped up in gestures of anger and fun, but my body was so sore from the day’s work I couldn’t enjoy the jokes. The waitress traded amiable insults with the man behind the bar (“Hey Numbnuts, I need a sloe screw.” “Have to wait, Babe, till the end of my shift”) but I didn’t catch them all. I’d become aware of hearing – just as at the plant, sniffing its awful fumes, I was always conscious of breathing – and my head buzzed with pain. I swore I’d never work for my father again.
______
As a graduate student at Indiana University, the center of folklore studies in America, I edited a small quarterly called Heartland Folktales and dreamed of starting a press of my own someday. My mother, an education coordinator at the Houston Police Academy, supported my decision. “Do what you want,” she told me one morning. “You’re rich. What are you worried about?” I’d been out of school for a month, and had come to ask her advice. She was relaxing on the police firing range between classes, pumping .38-caliber shells into the heart of a cardboard man. “You give a gun to a nineteen-year-old cop, send him to a one-room apartment in the middle of the night to stop a fist-fight between a man and a woman, both drunk, who don’t speak his language – that’s worry. You, you’re worth two, maybe three million dollars. What’s the problem?”
Jean, a plasma physicist, forty-nine years old (and fifteen years my senior) always agreed: “I don’t understand the point of your work, George, but if it makes you happy go ahead.” Roy, her seventeen-year-old by a previous marriage, stayed in the basement spelling Able, Baker, Charlie into his ham radio, eating chili and drinking beer. I was free to edit manuscripts and to write essays on folk art for my Texas Republic Press, established in 1982 when my father gave me ten thousand dollars.
In the hair-curling humidity of Houston’s hot afternoons I gladly went about my fieldwork. With a Sony portable cassette recorder whirring in my shirt I interviewed a retired postal worker who’d spent the last twenty-five years of his life erecting a monument to the orange. I talked to a woman who made plaster trees, lodging in their branches painted angels, Adam and Eve. I hung around with people on the margins of society, families visited by poverty and neglect: where folk art begins. I spent a lot of time watching kids. I think children have always lived in America’s margins. As Germaine Greer says, “Drinking and flirting, the principal expressions of adult festivity, are both inhibited by the presence of children.” Kids’ folk art, I began to see, includes astonishing insult strategies, as in their rhyming games (“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” etc.). Each morning I watched a redheaded boy named Steven, the youngest of the children in our neighborhood, scream as the older girls teased him:
Doctor Doctor can you tell
What will make poor Steven well
He is sick and going to die
That will make poor Lisa cry
Lisa Lisa don’t you cry
He’ll get better by and by
When he’s well he’ll dress in blue
That’s the sign he’ll marry you.
Lisa was Steven’s next-door neighbor, and nothing humiliated him more than having his name linked with hers, especially in singsong. The kids also established links through metaphor and simile: “Steven eats like a pig.”
And direct statement: “Your father’s a filthy plumber.”
“Well, your dad’s a midget Kung Fu spy!”
After lunch they often played leapfrog, with Steven as “It.” He bent down and the girls jumped over him. The oldest girl, a skinny brunette of about thirteen who seemed to be in charge, was the first to jump; as she did so she tweaked Steven’s ear. On the second pass she pulled his hair. Next time around she gave him a little kick, and so on. If any of the other girls failed to follow the leader she had to be “It.” I recognized the game as “Gentle Jack,” first noted in Edmund Routledge’s Every Boy’s Book, published in London in 1868.
“Possible topic,” I scribbled in my notebook. “Steven, dismantlement of. His ego, his standing in the group … Playmates taking out on him what they often experience at hands of adults?” The game, I noticed, had a strong verbal component, to justify the physical abuse: “You’re a turd, Steven. Your mother’s a mouse.”
“Components of insult run deep, poss. in all lives & encounters,” my notes went on. “Purpose of folk art to remind us? Purp. of children?”
______
“I’m too old to raise another child,” Jean insisted.
“It’s still possible, though, isn’t it?” I asked her one evening.
“You mean technically? Are all my cylinders still firing? Sure. But I’ve done the mother bit. This fall I’m on the tenure committee, the curriculum committee, the executive committee. Our peer review process for getting grants is breaking down in favor of congressional lobbying, and that’s a fight we don’t want to lose. I don’t have time, George, not even for Roy. And you’re out every night, God knows where, at your blues clubs or whatever. I don’t think we’d be ideal parents.”
She charged me with fostering an adolescent view of the world. “That’s the trouble with poor little rich boys – sit around and dream, dream, dream. Sex, romance, the perfect little family. Daily life, George. It’s stronger than anything. Dirty dishes, filling the car with gas, insurance bills, shopping for dinner.” She kissed my ear. “Stronger, even, than all those eager pictures in your lovely young head.”
In the fall of ’85, when she found out I was having an affair, she tore me out of every photograph we had of us together. “This is the vilest of your insults,” she said.
“I’ve fallen in love. I didn’t mean to.”
“Well, then.”
“I’m sorry. I’d like to stay.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
“Stop seeing her.”
“I’ll try.”
But Kelly and I continued to meet. She’d walked into the press office one afternoon with a newsletter, Update: Central America. “The Refugees: Who Are They?” the headline read.
“Can you print a thousand copies of this?”
“We’re not set up for that kind of work,” I told her. She rubbed her long white neck.
This Woman: Who Is She? I thought.
“Sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”
She represented the Central American Task Force, she explained, a group of citizens (“mainly women – men don’t seem as interested”) concerned about the violence raging then in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and U.S. intervention in those countries – these were the high Reagan years. The Task Force shipped school supplies to San Salvador and seeds to Managua. They planned to leaflet every Wednesday in front of City Hall.
“Try Alphaset over on Richmond,” I said. “They do bulk printing. They can probably get it out for you right away.”
The following Wednesday at lunchtime I joined her on the street. Eight young to middle-aged women marched behind her in a circle, carrying placards: U.S. OUT OF NICARAGUA, HANDS OFF EL SALVADOR, NO PASARAN. Kelly, wearing a jeans skirt and a green blouse embossed with yellow parrot figures, handed newsletters to businessmen and women on their way to City Hall. “Get the hell out of here and stop disturbing the peace,” a man told her. Kelly smiled. Conviction, controlled anger – a peppery combination, and it made me feel hot in my shirt.
She handed me a newsletter.
“Give me a stack. I’ll help you pass them out.”
Didn’t miss a beat. “All right. You can work the crowd over there by the reflecting pool.”
Four mounted policemen had cordoned off half a block for the small demonstration. “Whenever the Right Wingers march – the Klan or the anti-abortionists – the cops face the crowd so no one’ll harm the marchers,” Kelly told me later. “When we take to the streets they watch us, looking for excuses to break us up.” Two men with long zoom lenses stood by a row of parking meters, aiming their cameras at us.
I offered a leaflet to a briefcase man. “Care for an update on Central America?”
“Fuck you,” he said.
This happened three or four times. It was my fault; I couldn’t keep the smile on my face. I understood their annoyance: who likes solicitors? Once, I was standing in line at the Astrodome waiting to buy tickets to an Astros-Padres game. A militant farmer shoved a pamphlet into my hand. “If you eat you’re involved in agriculture,” he explained.
“If you throw up,” I said, “you’re no longer involved.”
He snatched back the pamphlet he’d handed me.
“Commie bitches!” a man yelled now from the steps of City Hall.
Kelly kept her friends in line – they wanted to tackle him, tear him apart, ship him in a CARE package under cover of night to a tiny island nation porous with recent democracy, yellow fever, and bent silver coins, massive market fluctuations and tsetse flies in the major export.
______
“So what does a folklorist do besides ask nosy questions and stick tape recorders in people’s faces?” Kelly asked once the newsletters were gone. We were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the courthouse.
“What makes you think we stick tape recorders in people’s faces?”
“I took a class as an undergraduate.”
“Not true. We’re very benign. Not a peep as we go about our business.”
“Which is?”
“Watching.”
“Is that why you showed up today?”
“No. I wanted to help.”
“What do you watch?” She crossed her stunning legs.
“Anything anyone does. The way you’re sitting right now. The way we’re talking. Culture’s always changing. Folklorists try to capture traditions before they disappear.”
“Like from old people, you mean?”
“Sometimes.” I put sugar in my coffee.
“It’s a bit anal retentive, isn’t it? Regressive?”
“No, you learn all sorts of amazing things.”
“Like what?”
“There are two kinds of old people.”
“Oh?” She smiled.
“Sure. There’s the well-informed old person, good as any library. Then there’s the talker. The talker may not be accurate, but the way he says what he says and the strength of his beliefs often tell more about the culture than any set of facts.”
“When you get old you’ll be a talker, right?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You came here to meet me, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any interest in Central America? I mean really?”
“Of course.” I ordered more cream. “They were taking pictures out there today –”
She waved her hand. “I’ve been photographed picketing the American Embassy in Managua. My file’s a mile long.”
In ’85, when this conversation took place, Nicaragua was the Left’s cause célèbre-flying into a war zone a sign of status, like owning a compact disc player or a VCR. It’s astonishing to me how quickly the Sandinistas (and the American Left, for that matter) dropped out of U.S. news, swallowed by the fires of Eastern Europe and a leaky local economy, but back then everyone I knew had a strong opinion about them, one way or another. President Reagan even suggested they might attack America, starting with the little town of Harlingen at Texas’s southern tip (there’s nothing in Harlingen to occupy, except a couple of damned old Dairy Qeens, maybe).
“This your first protest?” Kelly asked.
I nodded.
“Was it worth it?”
“You’re interested in different cultures,” I said. “I think you should come with me some night to hear the blues. I know the best clubs – black joints you can’t get in if you’re white. But they know me.”
“Are you asking me for a date?”
“I guess I am.”
“I should tell you,” she said. “I have two children from a previous marriage.”
“I love children.”
“Is there anything you should tell me?”
I slipped a napkin over my left hand but she’d already seen the ring. “I don’t know,” I said. “Like what?”
______
“When are you going to work today?” Jean said.
“As soon as I get ready. Need anything at the store? I can stop off on my way home.”
“Some Q-Tips. And a new ledger. We have to do the bills tonight.”
“I wanted to stop by the lumberyard this evening.”
“What lumberyard?”
“On 59. They’re having a sale.”
“What do you need lumber for?”
“I may want to build something.”
She smoothed my thick blond hair and looked at me sadly.
“What is it?” I said.
“You’re not going to build anything.”
“Yes I am.”
“You always say you want to build something. You never do.”
“Well, now I am.”
“You have to pick bill night to finally get started?”
“No. It’s just that they’re having this sale –”
“Every time I ask you to do something, George, you’ve got some idiot plan in the works.”
“The problem is, you don’t take me seriously.”
She laughed. “No, because your job involves going out every night and getting drunk.”
“I’m doing research at those clubs. The blues are a dying tradition.”
“If I ask you just this once to stay home with me tonight and help me with the bills, will you do it?”
“The sale’ll be over tomorrow.”
“George, I need to go over the Amex receipts with you. You have to be here, okay?”
The ogre’s endless demands: “Pick the vermin out of my hair.”
______
When the idea first occurred to me to customize a car I was sitting in the Elm Street Blues Club listening to a local zydeco band and splitting pitchers of Old Milwaukee with two guys I’d just met. We wrapped our arms around each other. “I’mone learn to play the pie-anny and join up with one of these-here bands,” said the fellow on my left. He poked his red nose in my ear. “Make me a million bucks. Buy a brewery. And some beef.”
“Hell, I’m going to build a piano,” I said.
The other fellow was not a practiced scoundrel. I never did find out what brought him to the club that night in his three-piece Hart Schaffner & Marx, or why he felt compelled to join us in our joyful dissolution, but there he was, moon-eyed and slurry. He said, “I’m twenty-five years old, did you know that? It’s a fact. And I’m going to tell you something. If I haven’t made a million by the time I’m thirty I’m going to put a bullet through my head.”
“There you go,” said Red-Nose.
“And I’ll tell you something else. I’m going to take as many people with me as I can.” He made a pistol with his fingers and started picking off the couples on the dance floor. I poured him another glass.
“Get me a fancy car, or maybe an air-conditioned bus, painted up so’s it glows in the dark,” Red-Nose said. “Play ever’ toilet in the South.”
“That’s it,” said the Suit. “A custom-made Eldorado and an Uzi.” He twirled in his chair, made a screeching sound like tires and aimed his arms at the band. “Chuka-chuka-chuka,” he said.
I went home drunk, woke Jean up and told her I’d had a vision of zinc-plated hubcaps.
“But those souped-up things are awful.”
“It’s folk art,” I said.
Pots, pans, a dozen eggs. Cajun food always sobered me up before going to bed, especially if I concocted a major mess, got to flinging spices around the kitchen. I pulled a red snapper out of the freezer, defrosted it in the microwave, dipped it in flour and milk along with a medium-sized soft-shell crab. Oregano, basil, cayenne pepper. A little Tabasco.
Usually in these late-night gourmet sessions, to keep myself alert, I mentally ran through as many blues labels as I could: Arhoolie out of El Cerrito (later from Berkeley), Alligator in Chicago, Memphis’s famous Sun. Howlin’ Wolf; Son Seals; Clifton Chenier, King of the Louisiana Bayous. But tonight I kept picturing the car. I melted a pat of butter and saw in its golden bubbles shiny push-button door locks.
On Saturdays I sat in an unnamed cafe near the Ship Channel swilling Monte Alban from a bottle. Worms curled in the golden tequila, tugs moaned at the mouth of the bay. Dock-hands wiped their fingers on the cotton stuffing spilling out of the booth seats, and happily greeted one another: “Asshole!” “Pigdip!”
A couple of Hispanics from the refinery smoothed the way for me with old pros, young lions, and members of the gangs. With their help I built one of the classiest low-riders in the city: crushed-velours dash, red silk roses wrapped around the tape player, velvet Virgin of Guadalupe in the back window. In the trunk, beveled mirrors, strobe lights, color postcards of the Astrodome, a fully stocked wet bar. A selection of magazines for my friends: Time, Outlaw Biker, Architectural Digest. Hydraulic pumps in the rear, lowered suspension in front. Tru-Spokes, “French-In” antenna.
Following Mexican custom I paid a priest from Maria de los Angeles Church in southwest Houston to christen the “Anti-Chrysler” (the odometer was stuck on 666,666). He flicked Holy Water from a cup onto the red vinyl roof.
“Excuse me, Father.” I wiped a stray drop off the hood. “I just Simonized that.”
The car would bring me closer to ethnic understanding, I thought: a passkey to the barrios. Or maybe I was just showing off. In every part of Latin Houston I proudly displayed the Beast. In the northeast above Canal Street, Mexican families had opened groceries, barbacoas, funeral homes. The smell of smoked fajitas, lime-soaked onions, and fresh tomatoes drifted past grassy yellow tool sheds and mixed with the aroma of coffee roasting at the Maxwell House plant over on Harrisburg. Even the wealthy families here lived poorly, ashamed of ostentation. Their Caribbean cousins rented modest brick homes in south Houston, near Martin Luther King Boulevard. I drove the Beast through these neighborhoods early one evening and made a lot of friends. Parched lawns, naked kids chasing the Paletas del Oasis, the Popsicle man whose tin-fendered truck played “Georgia on My Mind.” Most of the Dominicans worked for Macon and Davis, on the nuclear plant north of town. On Sunday afternoons the men (full round faces, high cheekbones, coffee-colored skin) sat among saints and ceramic animals in their living rooms cheering Jose Cruz. “He’s rounding second, rounding third . In the kitchen, sausage and plantains, barefooted women chopping pineapples, whispering about the tigres, the “bad men” who demanded protection money from families in the neighborhood.
Koreans were now running most of the old Cuban markets, I noticed. The Cubans, getting poorer, were probably migrating to another part of town, but that wouldn’t be clear for another couple of years.
Eighty to ninety thousand Salvadoran refugees lived wherever they could, anonymously in the suburbs or at shelters in Montrose and the Heights, partially gentrified neighborhoods where Kelly taught English twice a week.
“How’d you get involved with Latin refugees?” I asked her one night.
“Well, you can hardly grow up in Texas and not be aware of Hispanics. I’ve always loved the people, even back when I was a little girl. They have the most appealing, handsome faces.”
On Wednesdays she worked late at Casa Romero, the largest of the shelters. I’d fix dinner for her daughters: Monica, seven, Kate, five.
One night Monica pulled a deposit slip out of a drawer and drew an animal on it. “George, guess what this is.”
“An ostrich.”
“No.”
“I can’t guess, sweetie.”
“Yes you can.”
“Are those legs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“A zebra.”
“No!”
I put the cauliflower in the oven.
“Guess, George.”
“Monica, I’m trying to make dinner.”
“Guess!”
“Okay, give me a hint.”
“It lives in the water and has fins and long legs.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s like a beaver.”
“I give up.”
“It’s a beaver!” She laughed.
“Beavers don’t have fins.”
“Yes they do.”
______
“Did you tuck the girls in?”
“Yeah. Kate’s full of energy this evening.” I stroked Kelly’s breast.
“Wears me out.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“I’m afraid I am. Long day. We had a fire at the Casa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Found some rags in the basement. Kerosene.”
“Who’d want to burn the place?”
“Lots of folks. People in the neighborhood. There’s some old guys who’ve lived there twenty, thirty years. They’re real unhappy about all the Latins moving in. And the cops are always dropping by, waiting for us to provoke them.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“No, we caught it before it did much damage, but life’s getting spooky. Like those fundamentalist freaks blowing up abortion clinics.”
I kissed her forehead. On the wall above her bed, a world map; thumbtacks in every country from which she’d had a lover. “How many have there been?” I asked, pointing up there now.
“I’m not sure. I lost count somewhere down around Bolivia. How’re things with Jean?”
“About the same.”
“You could move in with me.”
“I could.”
She yawned. “I don’t know why you married that old woman anyway.”
______
Jean was working on a theory that the smallest particles in the brain – which she called “morphemes,” in deference to my dumb grammarian’s mind-are trapped fragments of the human psyche, just as matter is a form of trapped light. “Life is electrified activity in which every particle strives to return to pure energy – an unagitated state,” she told me in bed one night. “The easiest way to do this is to attract one’s opposite. This movement, of course, dooms each particle to solitude. If it finds its opposite, it dies. As long as it searches, it remains unfulfilled. For every feeling of love there’s a feeling of fear. These are physical, palpable things, George, I’m convinced of it. Fear is matter. And matter’s free when it returns into light.”
“I kind of like the shape it’s taken here.” I squeezed her thigh.
She lighted a candle and turned off the lamp. “Do I bore you with my theories?”
“No.”
“One of the worst things about being nearly fifty years old is that life holds few surprises for you.” She cupped herself around my ass. “There’s very little I feel excited about anymore. When I latch onto a new idea I tend to get carried away.”
In the mornings she rose early and did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups. On Tuesdays at noon she had an aerobics class. In the evenings she liked to throw a softball around with me in the park. She’d developed a strong arm.
“I’ll do everything,” I said in the park one afternoon, returning to my old subject. “Feeding, nurturing –”
“Doesn’t track with reality, bucko,” she called back, whacking her mitt. “Babies just naturally go for the mother. We have the milk.”
“It’d be different with an adopted child. They prefer a fuller menu.”
She fired a fastball into my mitt.
“Ow.”
“Even an adopted child would imprint on me. I’m just not willing to do it.”
I watched Mustangs, Impalas, and Gremlins shuttle by on the freeway down the hill from the park. On an overpass someone had painted “War Pigs in Space.” A few miles away, helicopters lowered white stretchers onto the gleaming glass towers of the medical center.
Jean picked up the bat. “You need to decide if you’re committed to this marriage before we start talking seriously about adopting a child. Because if we do have one, then you run off with your little Leftie, that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I won’t get stuck at my age with being a single mother again – Roy’s enough.” She tried to hit me a pop fly but the ball sailed over my head. “I told you you’d get tired of me. That day on the golf course, remember? I knew then why you were coming on so strong.”
“I liked you.”
“It was the novelty of seeing an old woman who could wear a pair of shorts.”
“Jean –”
“Oh, I have a very clear-eyed view of myself. I have nice legs, but I’m forty-nine years old. You can’t hang on to that beautiful young body of yours forever, you know? Golden belly, strong thighs – they’re not yours to keep. You don’t know what that means yet. Believe me, it’s a shock.”
“Let’s go get some ice cream.”
“Wake up one morning –”
“Okay? Jean?”
She started to cry.
“For God’s sake, you’re talking to me the way you talk to Roy,” I said. “I’m just trying to make things smoother here.”
“My breasts sag, George! I have these handles on my hips! I told you that.” She threw the ball in the dirt. “Why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you leave me alone?”
______
Kelly exhausted and drawn. Another fire at the Casa. They’d lost the whole kitchen and one of the downstairs bathrooms.
“I have to go back there,” she said.
“It’s after midnight.”
“Can you stay with the girls?”
Monica and Kate were wide awake. I made some hot chocolate.
“Where’s Mommy going?” Kate said. “She has to take care of some business.”
“George, remember that pony we saw at the stable? With the brown spots on his back?”
“No, honey, I wasn’t there.”
“Yes you were.”
“Your mother took you to the stable by herself.”
“No she didn’t.”
“Did so.” Monica shoved her sister.
“Snotty snotty snotty.”
“That’s enough, you two.”
Kate grabbed my hand. “Remember his bulgy eye, George? Was his eye sticky?”
“I don’t know, Kate. Probably.”
She tugged my fingers.
“Yes, honey, what is it?” I said.
“Mommy says you live with another lady.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s my friend.”
“Better friends than us?”
“I’ve known her longer than you,” I explained.
“My robot can turn into a truck. Want to see?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t like her,” Kate said.
“You don’t know her.”
“When are you gonna live with us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll help you clean your room,” Kate said.
“Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate that.” I kissed her cheek.
“George?”
“Yes, Kate?”
“This lady?”
“Her name is. Jean.”
“She’s like a grandmother, isn’t she?”
“What has your mother been telling you?”
“She says she’s about a hundred and fifty years old.”
“Not yet.”
Kate sat on her foot. “Does she really have wrinkles on her butt?”
______
Late one night three plainclothesmen arrested two Salvadoran women at Casa Romero and charged them with selling amphetamines.
“They were diet pills,” Kelly told me afterward. “Laxatives. It’s a war of nerves. They’re trying to crack us bit by bit. They’ve subpoenaed our files.”
“You’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Harry, one of the volunteers here at the house …”
“What?” I said.
“He made a couple of border runs.”
“Jesus. Illegals?”
She nodded.
“You told me –”
“I know, but these were desperate people.”
“How many trips did he make?”
“Three.”
“The INS’ll have a field day.”
“I’ll need you to babysit from time to time, but I think we’d better cool it, George, until things blow over. I don’t want you getting mixed up in all this.”
“Kelly –”
“I mean it.”
She was always firm when it came to her plans. I knew I couldn’t change her mind. I’d miss spending afternoons at the Casa. The place looked like a take-out barbecue joint – had, in fact, been a restaurant. A Pepsi-Cola bottle cap painted on the side of the house was starting to peel, smoky in the shade of four white oaks. Red cedar picnic tables sat in the front yard next to a gravel drive. Newspapers and old fliers, wrapped in rubber bands, nestled in the high, wet grass. It was homey.
One day at the shelter I’d talked to a thin Latin woman with dark scars on her arms. “Who did this to you?” I said.
“The Guardia Civil in San Salvador.”
“Why?”
“They took my husband. I was passing his picture around in church.”
The beige hall carpet smelled of cat pee and vomit. Wallpaper hung in strips, an old-fashioned dial telephone sat on a cardboard box in the corner.
I pulled a notebook out of my pocket. The woman rocked back and forth on the floor. “Tell me,” I said.
“The men in masks, they force you to worship their whips, their fists. They give them names,” she said. “‘The Enforcer,’ ‘The Lollipop.’” She rubbed her arms. “After many beatings these words are the only ones left in your head. Your own name has been taken away from you. You’ve betrayed the names of your family and friends. Water hurts, light hurts, clothing hurts. But the hardest pain is not when they hit you. It’s when they make you stand for many hours.” She squeezed her legs. “Alone, in a room. You begin to hate your feet.”
Water trickled through a pipe inside the wall. “The body – its own enemy?” I scribbled. I recalled, as a kid, painting the fireplugs at my father’s refinery: the soreness that stayed for weeks in my back and arms, the weight of sitting and walking.
Insults to the body.
The woman closed her eyes. The hatred and suspicions that characterize put-downs had begun to hit too close to home. I thanked her for speaking to me.
______
I followed Kelly’s wishes and stayed away from the Casa. Most days I worked at the press or just drove around. One afternoon I went to the Shamrock Six, Houston’s worst movie theater, and bought a ticket to a movie called Hollywood Student Hookers. I never knew, in advance, what was playing at the Shamrock, or what time the films started. I came to watch the audience: predominantly black, several generations bunched together in the seats – Great-grandad in the middle, Mom and Dad, festive kids spilling ice on the floor. Everyone talked to the screen.
“Don’t go in there you fool, he waitin’ for you!”
“Now you gonna get it.”
“Yo ass be grass.”
A circus of insults.’
Hollywood Student Hookers had been playing for half an hour. I took a sticky seat. A woman shot a man in the face.
“I tol’ you, sucker,” someone yelled at the screen.
I sat through two showings of the film, greatly enjoying the crowd. Afterwards I swung by Prince’s for shakes to take to the girls.
Twice a week I babysat Monica and Kate while Kelly tutored her English students. One day I took them to the “Orange Show” on Houston’s east side. That retired postman I’d interviewed had built a monument there to his favorite fruit, using scraps, pieces of farm equipment, and masonry tile. Winding metal staircases, red umbrellas, Texas flags. Stages for music and puppets. I loved to see the girls in my car, the way they sank into the seats like little dolls. Before we’d got in the Beast for this trip, Monica had cut the side of her foot on a sliver of glass in the street. Kleenex and tears.
“George, I’m bleeding on my shoe.”
“It’s all right, honey. Press down with the Kleenex.”
Kate shot passing cars with a straw. “Our daddy was supposed to call us last night but he didn’t,” she said. She liked to comb the Chrysler’s goatskin seats.
“George, I can’t walk!”
“When we get there we’ll get you a piece of ice to put on it.”
Ten minutes later she was running up and down the metal stairs. It was late afternoon, with a full moon low in the sky.
Watching the puppets, Kate leaned her small body against my back, resting her head on my shoulder, asking questions about the action onstage.
“What’s that clown doing?”
“Reading.”
“Reading what?”
“A letter from someone very far away.”
“Farther than the end of the street?”
“Yes.”
“Farther away than the moon?”
“Just about.”
“Oh,” she said, twisting around into my arms. “When will my daddy call?”
“I don’t know, Kate.” Kelly’s ex was a traffic engineer in San Diego.
“I go see him in the summer.”
“I know.”
“We go swimming.” She crawled off my lap. I showed her the evening star.
______
In the next three weeks, fourteen Salvadorans, eight Mexicans, and a Guatemalan boy were arrested at the Casa, on charges ranging from burglary and smuggling to possession of illegal substances. Casa Romero was ordered closed, its furniture impounded. Deportation proceedings began against nine of the Latins.
“I’m going to Arizona,” Kelly told me one day soon after.
“What’s in Arizona?”
“Harry has some friends there who’re setting up a shelter. Desert community. Sympathetic to the cause.”
I touched her knee. “Are there freeways in Arizona? I’m not happy unless I’m on a freeway.”
“I know.” She smiled sadly.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I want to do this.”
“I’ll miss you,” I told her, stunned.
“Me too.” She tried not to cry. “You’re a real good talker, George.”
______
Driving through the barrios, gazing at graffiti on old city walls: U.S. OUT OF GUATEMALA, U.S. OUT OF WESTERN EUROPE, U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.
A kid on a bike shot me the finger, out of the blue. I laughed. How could I leave this place, this seething gumbo of spicy, bad behavior? Houston was more than just the city in which I lived. It was a spot whose intricate culture, whose social codes I’d cracked.
I called Kelly from a pay phone and told her I’d live on Fritos if she left. “I’ll waste away …”
“You’re being deliberately cruel,” she said. “Come with me.”
“What would I do in Arizona?”
“Open another press. Write books. I don’t know, George.”
“You think I don’t have a life here, is that it?”
“It’s certainly not a life you can’t improve on, is it? Is it?” she said. “Look at the hours you keep. The crap you eat. Here’s a chance to start over, to lead an intelligent –”
“Intelligence has nothing to do with it,” I said.
______
When I thought about my children, I imagined them in ten-pound, double-ply fertilizer sacks at the back of the garage. If I talked Jean into having them – a boy and a girl – I’d cut the baling wire and let them out.
“You’re late,” she said. I’d been driving around all day. My eyes were swollen from crying. “Supper’s in the fridge. Where’ve you been?”
“Running errands.”
She’d been working on her computer. “George?”
“Yes?”
“How worried should I be?”
“What about?” I put my hands on her shoulders from behind. She touched my fingers. “I don’t know,” I said.
She turned the desk lamp away from her face. “When I got married the first time, my husband and I seemed perfectly matched,” she said. “Emotionally, intellectually, temperamentally. Our goals were the same. We each wanted a nice house, dinner parties on the patio. But right after Roy was born I felt this desire to go back to school. I couldn’t understand it. I’d never been ambitious for a career. What had changed?”
She placed her elbows on the desk. “Now I think people get married for very specific reasons. Roger wanted someone to arrange his social life. I wanted a child. Beyond those things we had nothing to build on. I guess I’m not sure marriage is functional after a certain point. It has a half-life of maybe five years.”
“What did you need from me?” I asked.
“I wanted to feel sexy again.”
I kissed the back of her neck.
“Do you know what quarks are?” she said.
“Subatomic particles, right?”
“Do you know where the word comes from? Finnegan’s Wake. Guy who named them thought it was a nice-sounding nonsense word Joyce made up. Turns out, in German ‘Oliark’ means something like ‘cottage cheese.’” She turned off the lamp. “I can’t seem to make sense of –”
“Shhh.”
Crying softly against my shoulder.
______
Kelly was leaving on Saturday night. “It’s crazy to cross Texas in the heat,” she said.
I touched her chin. “You have the smoothest skin …”
“We’ll leave around nine, from the house. I hope you’re there.”
I squeezed her hands.
“You won’t be, will you?”
I didn’t say anything. She kissed my cheek.
Saturday afternoon I drove for hours in the Beast, into the piney woods then south along the NASA road. I felt as groundless as an astronaut reeling in a dizzying orbit.
Around six I stopped at a place I knew called Grady’s and ordered a chicken-fried steak. On the bar TV the Mets were thrashing the Astros. I ordered a pitcher of beer. When the baseball game was over I played a little pool, threw some darts. Bought another pitcher.
______
Ten-twenty. My stomach tightened. You asshole, I thought. Maybe she’d waited. I could leave all my clothes … buy a pair of shorts down the road.
I was kidding myself. My mind had been set all along.
Mike, the bartender, said, “Rack ‘em up, George. I’ll give you a lesson in eight ball.”
I rubbed my eyes. Stood. Swayed. Jean would wonder where I was if I didn’t phone soon. “All right,” I said. Mike put a quarter in the table and the balls fell out: a thunderous boom.
“You break,” Mike said.
“Sure.”
We squared off across the room. Too much beer. The table swirled. Solids, stripes, slats in the floor, golden bottles, canned laughter from the television speaker. Mike shuffled his feet, waiting for me to start. “George?” he said. I chalked my cue, gazed at the tip. Bright blue dust rose into the air, shimmied, filtered down onto the smooth green table-carpet .
I remembered telling the girls stories at night to get them to sleep. I remembered sitting with them on the porch at Casa Romero talking to a young Salvadoran woman. Above us, cicadas caromed off the eaves. “They get in,” the woman said, proud of her English, “when you open the door.” I remembered trick-or-treating – Monica dressed as Madonna, singing “Like a Virgin,” Kate wearing an Albert Einstein mask. She gripped my hand. “It was the scariest one in the store,” she said.