Lowell Mick White
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Ordinary Horrors

Lowell Mick White Night at the Tex Lounge

12/4/2021

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Where to start?

Let’s start with setting.

​It was December, 1981. I was living in the Haunted House on Pruett.


The Tex Lounge—not to be confused with the Austex Lounge, on South Congress—was a sleazy beer joint on 4th Street, just west of Congress. The photo below is the best I could find—the bar's entrance was just to the right of the awning on the far right side.
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The Tex Lounge was sleazy and nasty, but a step up from the super-nasty (yet interesting) rumdum bars I wrote about here. The bar itself was kind of small, but there was a big room on the east side with a couple of pinball machines—one of them a KISS machine that I could roll all the time. There was a barmaid from Minnesota named Gail, who was lovely, and we actually knew a person in common back in the north. I would go down to the Tex in the afternoons and play pinball and flirt with Gail and work on being a colorful character in a sleazy bar. Every now and then the Tex Lounge would book a band in the big room--Kathy and the Kilowatts was a big draw, and the Gutter Brothers.

My connection to the Gutter Brothers was through Peter Nye, the band’s bass player, who was also a bartender at the Deep Eddy, and also a neighbor at the 700 Club. One Sunday night we were hanging around the Eddy watching TV and when the bar closed, barmaid KB sent us on home. We walked up the hill to the 700 Club, and as we crossed 7th Street three or so cop cars screeched up and swarmed around us. Not city cops—UT cops. They got out of their cars and one of them grabbed me by the arm.

“There’s been reports of prowlers around the married student housing,” one of the cops said. “You don’t match the description,” he said to Peter. “But YOU do,” he said to me.

“Oh,” Peter said. “Well, I’ll see you later.”

He crossed the street and went up the steps and into his apartment. Ha. I wasn’t too worried—it was like a big joke. I had an ironclad alibi—down at the bar all evening being a ne'er do well. I got to sit in the cop car until someone came by and looked me over and said I wasn’t the prowler and then they cut me loose and I went on up to my apartment. Peter later bought me a beer and apologized for bailing.

​The Gutter Brothers’ biggest song was a punk number called “Killer Waitresses.” It was sort of inappropriate in 1980, and certainly inappropriate in 2021.
​Killer Waitresses
They got big tits
Killer Waitresses
They get big tips
Yes. Well. It was fun at the time.

​They also had a great t-shirt, which you can see me wearing here.

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The shirt is long gone now. When it existed, it showed Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy—fucking!—in the gutter. (Artwork by Peter Nye...).

I guess that was inappropriate, too. But amusing!

So, I don’t know, we were all at the Deep Eddy one evening, and I was ranting about something. Probably complaining that someone (my professors?) didn’t recognize my greatness or whatever.

“Well, you’re a great American,” Peter said.

“Yes!” I yelled. “I am a great American!”

And so it was on. The Gutters had a gig coming up at the Tex Lounge, and Peter set it up as a tribute to me.

The night itself was fun.

Many people came—I didn’t do a count, so I don’t know exactly how many. Mostly people I knew, but also people who came in off the street because it was Saturday night in a sleazy bar in Austin. Much beer was drunk. At one point the band invited me to read a poem—and this was my first public performance.

I kind of sucked. I’m the weird kind of introvert that wants people to pay attention to them, until people are paying attention to them, and then they get anxious.  (Also I mentioned much beer, right?). I started to read a poem. I’d never used a microphone. People had trouble hearing me. Peter Nye came over an adjusted the mic a couple of times. Maybe it was better. I continued reading—a punk poem I’d written a couple of years before in Minneapolis after hearing the Sex Pistols record for the first time.
​My mommy was a sterno bum
My daddy was a whore
Granddad was a newsboy to the age of 84
(what a slimy bastard he was)
 
I’m never ever gonna go very far
I’m never ever gonna drive a nice car
Every day is just the same
I’ve never even been to a baseball game!
 
And I’m so pissed.
It was an authentically terrible performance. Someone even threw a beer can at me! Sadly empty. Oh well. I think I’ve gotten better since then.

But! Despite the poetry, it was a great night! A big sporting evening, as they say. And when the show was over, I was grabbed by some characters and we drove down to the coast to watch the sun rise.

​Youth is exhausting.


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You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness....

“That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters.  A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth Street and beyond.  This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom.”
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and Synonym for Love.


​Read That Demon Life now!
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Memories of the Kennedy Assassination

11/19/2021

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He didn't make it to Austin that day....
(This is a continuation, sort of, of my kindergarten post here).

And so one day in kindergarten we were building something with the new blocks and the teacher came into the room and said “Children, the president is dead.” And I still remember how my stomach just--dropped—and I was left kind of confused. Like—what does that mean? And I was scared—I think now the fear was based more on the dark tone of the teacher’s voice, rather than any childish anxiety about the fate of the nation.

My mom, as usual, came and took me home. The weather across West Virginia was cold and gray and damp that day. (That’s not a memory—I looked it up). Don’t remember if we talked about anything in the car. My parents were definitely not JFK fans—my mom told me years later how, following the 1960 election, she was sick to her stomach every time she saw JFK’s face. (I later came to understand this—after the 2000 election, I had a similar reaction to George W. Bush).

When I got home there was big big difference—no cartoons! TV stations in those days telecast cartoons for the after-school set. Looney Toons was my favorite, especially Bugs Bunny, but I liked Woody Woodpecker, too. But with JFK dead, there were just a bunch of solemn old people on TV talking. Man, that was terrible.

My dad came home cussing. That was actually kind of normal, but the cussing this time was about Kennedy. He’d been up in Pittsburgh for the day with some other grad students and they were driving back to Morgantown when they heard the news. My dad’s immediate response was, “Ah, the son of a bitch deserved it.” The other grad students—objected. I guess it got kind of heated.

Anyway, he got home pissed and we all sat in front of the TV for the next four or so days while my dad kept up a rude commentary. I remember at one point him saying, “They’re all acting like they expect him to jump up out of the coffin any minute!” I sat up at that—Whoa, JFK jumping up out of the coffin would have been cool! 

I thought it was also cool how they wedged the boots in backwards on that horse. And Haile Selassie sure had a bunch of medals. (“Ah, he gives himself a goddamn medal every time he builds a bridge,” my dad said).

So! Fifteen years or so later and I ended up in Austin, Texas, at a bar called Raul’s. Seeing a band called The Huns. And the squirrelly lead singer got behind the mic and yelled, “Fifteen years ago a president came to this state. And YOU killed him! And WE’RE glad he’s dead!”

And--bang-bang-bang noise-noise-noise, etc….

​I mean--
​He said he'd get us to the moon
But spent his time chasing poon
That’s pretty funny!

Punk rock, y’all.

And, so, anyway, about a year after that, I was down at the Deep Eddy with a girl I liked named M, and I was telling her about seeing The Huns—and “Glad He’s Dead.” We were seated sort of toward the door end of the bar, me with my back to the door. I heard behind me someone say, “You’re an asshole.”

What?

I turned around and there was a squat older guy at the very end of the bar holding a mug of beer. He looked pissed.

“John F. Kennedy was the greatest president of all time,” the guy said.

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Well, my dad said the son of a bitch deserved it.”

“Well, your dad’s an asshole, too.”

“Malcolm X said the chickens came home to roost.”

“And Malcolm X is an asshole, too.”

​But! Things did not escalate! Kind of surprising, right? M got the drunk guy chilled down, and the guy ended up telling M and myself his whole lugubrious stupid life story, which didn’t amount to much. Typical Silent Generation. Loved JFK. Worked hard. He’d gone to high school with Johnny Unitas. That was the high point of his life—“They’ll never be able to take that away from me.” He had Johnny Unitas—and those memories of JFK.



​​(I wrote about some aspects of Robert Caro's account of the assassination here).
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My Desk, c. 1982

11/12/2021

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This is my desk in the Haunted House, 1982. It’s messy—just like my brain….

I wrote about this desk once before, c. 1981 (here). But it was earlier in my haunted residency, which I wrote about here.  There’s more going on in this photo than the 1981 shot—there was more going on in my life, too.

I think this photo was probably taken in the early morning, after me being up all night. Morning sunlight is coming from the east, and my lamp is still on. Only one bulb in my lamp!

There’s an empty Coors can (why was I drinking Coors? I was young). A coffee cup with, probably, coffee in it. Empty Coke bottle in the background on the windowsill. Also on the windowsill is another coffee cup and a cool bookend with a propeller—now sadly lost. I wonder what happened to that. Don’t know what the red book is.

The rectangular-ish thing on the windowsill is one of those expandable file folders. Who knows what I was sticking in it. Probably unpaid bills.

There’s a jar back there I was probably using for a drinking glass.

Also one of those stacking file things—I had several of those, mostly carried off from my dad’s office. I just crammed junk into them—unpaid bills, probably, like my dad.

My trusty Smith-Corona is in the center. I was working on two projects then—a fly fishing book, and the rock’n’roll novel. I can’t make out what the notebook says—I’m thinking it’s probably the fly fishing book, now fortunately lost.

In the foreground next to the typewriter is a typing guide for margins—you’d feed that heavy plastic sheet into the typewriter behind the paper you were typing on, and then you could see the margins through the paper. 

And there’s a mystery—I can’t figure out what the blue object is. The words are still fuzzy no matter how much I enlarge it. The fact that it doesn’t trigger a memory probably indicates that it’s something insignificant (or maybe traumatic?). I’m thinking it’s something mundane like a package of socks.

(Contest! If anyone can make it the blue object, I’ll send you one of my books).
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Where I Lived Then Now VI: The Haunted House

10/29/2021

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This is 2309 Pruett Street, where I lived from the summer of 1981 to the fall of 1982. It’s a fourplex. I had apartment 1-A, down on the lower left.
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I got this photo recently from Zillow—the fourplex certainly didn’t look like this back in the day—at all. I don’t have a vintage picture of the front of the house, but here is one of the back:

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See those stripes? I went home for Christmas 1981 and while I was in West Virginia a pipe burst and the place flooded. In this picture you can see where water was seeping out through the walls and foundation. It was a mess by the time I got back! Mold, strange creatures….

This place was most notable not for flooding, or for a massive roach infestation, but for being haunted. Yeah! There was a ghost.

​I wrote about the ghost in a story, “Mexican Brick.”

​He first encountered the ghost—encountered, saw, felt, experienced something, whatever it was—one night when he jolted awake and saw his dog, a white mutt terrier named Soldier, dancing down the hallway toward the living room. Above the dog was a pale blue light, fist-sized and fuzzy in the darkness, bobbing just above the dog’s head, high enough that Soldier’s dancing leaps could not quite reach it. Soldier seemed frightened and excited at the same time, circling around backwards with his butt on the carpet, then jumping forward as high as he could and snapping at the air. Garza sat up and watched the blue light move down the hallway into the living room where it rose up toward the ceiling fan and slowly faded. Soldier crouched on the floor looking stupidly at the ceiling—at whatever had been there.
And, because I have absolutely no shame when it comes to recycling my source material, in an outtake from my current work-in-progress:
The Austin ghost I’d shared a house with was disquieting, at first. It was in an apartment in an older building, a four-plex, and I lived there for nine months, a school year. It wasn’t a spectacular haunting—I’d just start awake in the middle of the night and see—lights, balls of soft glow—and I’d watch them float down the hall from my bedroom to the living room and sort of dissipate. Four or five other times I started awake to find the vapory form of a woman sitting in the chair next to my bed, watching me.
That sort of captures the basic phenomena—balls of light floating around. My beloved pup, Rugay, seeing the balls of light. A shadowy woman watching me sleep.

It was a creepy place—it was always creepy.

The haunted house was wedged in the courtyard ∟ of the 700 Club, which I wrote about here. I lived in a second-floor apartment overlooking the courtyard, and so had a good view of whatever went on at 2309 Pruett. For a while a crazy guy lived there who spent a lot of time screaming (about what we never knew) and then, early one morning, he ran out into the courtyard shooting a pistol and then he ran over and shut off the power for both buildings. He got taken away. Then there was a family who left their kids—toddlers—locked in the bedroom while they went off to work and we could hear those poor kids wailing all day and my neighbor called child protective services on them and then the kids were taken away and after a while the parents moved out too.

After that this apartment, with its history of creepiness, was vacant. Rent was $20 a month less than the 700 Club, and so I happily moved next door.

And the ghost was there—right from the start. As I said above—balls of light. Shadowy woman. An overall feeling of weirdness.

Am I engaging in my own weirdness to say I really liked this apartment? Because I really liked this apartment! It was a good time in my life. The ghost just added to the edge! I was working a series of stupid jobs (see here and here). I was trying to write a novel for the first time. I was seeing lots of bands. I was having fun being young.

Here are some more photos:
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I was recognized....
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Rugay's only trick: "Adore!"
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Hero Rugay
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Writer at work...?
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Fixing to head out for a night on the town....
Here’s something that happened in this apartment: the place was infested with roaches, as were all the places I lived in then. So sometimes we’d get loaded and hunt the roaches with a BB pistol—shake the furniture, watch them away scurry up the wall--bap, bap, bap. Rugay jumping with excitement, amusing late night fun. 

(One night, after the bar closed, a neighbor, Jerry the Postman, came over and watched the hunt. Jerry later owned a bookstore in Dallas, where he knew writer Chuck Taylor, who heard the hunt story from him and appropriated it, turning it from a energetic youthful fun story to boring tragic middle-aged story. This is apparently how literature works).

Another night I stupidly left my keys down at the Deep Eddy and was locked out. Rugay was locked in! I had to get to the poor little guy, so I bang shouldered the door open, busting it. The next morning I just nailed the door shut and went in and out through the back door. (The landlord didn’t appreciate my carpentry skills).

Eventually I moved out—off to Connecticut for a house-sitting gig. Year and years later, when I was driving the cab, I got a call to pick up a guy at this address. When the customer came out and got in the car, I asked, “Is that place still haunted?”

The guy was shocked. “Hey—how’d you know about that?”

When I explained, he told me that—Yeah, it was still haunted—balls of light, shadowy figures—and that he’d hired a psychic to come and do a reading. It turned out that the ghost was that of an old woman who’d died of the flu in the late 1950s.

So there.

But—I worry.

​A few years back the building was renovated—really, really renovated. It’s pretty nice now.
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My worry—what happened to the ghost?

I hope she’s still there.

Haunted House pros: Ghost! Cheap (then), opportunities for amusing late-night recreation

Haunted House cons: busted front door, rickety plumbing (these have probably been fixed)

Verdict: If you can afford it, move in now!


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You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness....

“That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters.  A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth Street and beyond.  This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom.”
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and Synonym for Love.


​Read That Demon Life now!
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Treacherous Stressful Driving

2/13/2021

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So this was a day of hard driving. I had been up in the northwest corner of New Mexico, fishing the San Juan River, and was headed back to Austin and it was—icy.

Had about 100 miles of this heading down Hwy 550. Fortunately, there wasn’t much traffic—that school bus in front of me for a long time, a few other cars. At one crossroads there were two big dogs cavorting around having fun. The road got better south of Cuba and I drove along fine.

But then I made a mistake. I was heading south on I-25, and decided that I wanted to drive by the Trinity Site, more or less, so I headed east on 380 through the desert—and, yeah, the Trinity site was off there somewhere in the vastness, so that was cool. And I headed on east. But then the road past Carrizozo climbed up into the mountains. And there was fucking snow up in the mountains! And the sun went down and it was nighttime. Yikes!

So I drove on over the mountains in a snowstorm in the dark. I had a cassette of Prince’s Purple Rain playing, and I listened to it over and over, a steady nice rhythm as the wipers thudded across the windshield. I remember anticipating how stupid I would feel back at the bar explaining how I ended up in a goddamn ditch or worse—and that anticipation of shame kept me alert. Shame kept me alive!

And I did make it down out of the mountains to Roswell, where I got a motel and crashed hard.
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The Austin ice storm of 1997. Another stressful day of driving.

I was driving the cab in those days, and I had a day shift beginning at 400am. So I made my way carefully downtown, and got my first ride at the (then) Marriott, taking a guy to the airport. On the way back from the airport I saw a Cadillac all up askew in the middle of someone’s yard, and a guy standing beside the car. He flagged me down.

“I ran off the road!” he said. “Can you give me a ride?”

“Sure,” I said.

The guy went back to the Caddy and pulled out a shotgun, a woman’s purse, and a 12-pack of Budweiser.

I guess I was looking at him somewhat skeptically.

“It’s my mother’s purse,” the guy explained.

I guess that made sense. We drove somewhere or other.

The guy asked me, “How come you’re not running off the road like everybody else?”

“Because I’m driving 15 miles an hour,” I said.

I was the only cab in central Austin for most of the day. You’d think I would’ve made a lot of money, right? But I didn’t, really. Because I could only drive 15 fucking miles an hour, and every trip took forever.

Oh well.

We are under a winter storm warning this weekend. Ice! Snow! Cold! I have an appointment to get my covid vaccine Tuesday, and, if I have to, I will endure more treacherous driving to not die. The rest of y’all need to stay home.
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Another Stupid Job: Hod-Carrier

12/4/2020

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Look at that poor little feller!

He’s all tired out and sweaty. I hope he gets a shower and a beer and a nap!

Yes—that’s me. September, 1982.

(And he did get a shower and a beer, though probably no nap).

I was working as a day laborer through Manpower. And—I kind of liked Manpower. You’d call in and say you needed work, either late afternoon for work the next day, or early in the fucking morning for same day, and then wait to get called back. Some of the gigs sucked, some were pretty good. Some lasted just half a day, some—like this one—for a couple of weeks. You got paid on Wednesdays, and when you stopped by to pick up your paycheck there was always a cooler of beer and you could sit around and complain about whatever.

Here in this photo I was working at a construction site in what was then northeast Austin. It was a gig that started out sucky but got good. The photo was taken during the sucky period. I was a fucking bricklayer’s helper for a couple of days.

Yikes. My back still aches at that.

Bricklayers are highly skilled workers and they are extraordinarily impatient motherfuckers. More mud! More bricks! I was out there running around in the September heat—mid 90s, which isn’t that hot until you’re out in it all day carrying all kinds of heavy fucking shit. It sucked.

But at least I can put on my Writer’s Resume that I once worked as a hod-carrier.

On the third day at the site, the foreman or whoever, the boss, told me that he needed me inside the building for cleanup. Yes! The building was—AIR CONDITIONED!

it was mostly empty. Sheet rock guys were still putting up walls but the floors were open—you could have a go-cart track in there, if you wanted one. Along with another guy, I was given a push broom and a garbage can, and we went up to the sixth floor and started sweeping.

We worked slow. We did a great job. We made it last, working out way down, one floor after another.

The other guy, whose name I sadly forget, was a musician, and so we talked about rock’n’roll, etc. A nice guy.

I was fascinated by the sheet rock guys, who were stomping around on stilts. I wished I could do that (not work on stilts, just stomp around on stilts). For a couple of days two men and two women showed up and put to work scraping paint off the windows. There were all dressed in orange and were on their way to the compound of the Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh and do cult stuff or whatever. The Sabra and Shatila massacres happed while we were working, and we all talked about that….

When the musician and I worked our way down to the first floor and finished, we were sent to work outside again. The bricklayers were gone, thank Whomever, and we were put to work doing landscaping stuff, mostly moving piles of dirt from one place to another. There wasn’t much to do, the boss just wanted to keep us on. The last two days we were given sledgehammers and sent to the back of the building to bust up some concrete that had been poured in the wrong place. We took our time on that, too, singing a version of San Cooke’s “Chain Gang.” A woman who worked at the hotel across the parking lot (now a Crowne (sic) Plaza, then a Marriott) came out a couple of times and gave us cokes and shared a joint with us because it was 1982 in Austin.

So, the photo. I am wearing a Dover Elevator hat that some guy at the Deep Eddy gave me. I liked that blue—it matched my eyes. My shirt is an old Sears khaki work shirt—old, you can see rips in the elbow. (I’ve always kind of aspired to be a ragamuffin). I liked those shirts.

From the ceiling is some black crepe paper, my attempt at ironic decoration. I'm not sure what's over the doorway. Something interesting, probably.

Hanging from the door frame is my old Boy Scout knapsack—I got that like in 1967 and had it for years and years. (It sadly disappeared a move or two back).

On the wall is a poster from Club Foot—my fave music bar. I’m pretty sure that’s from the Video Night, where they filled the bar with TVs and showed music videos, then a new-fangled invention. (I remember that night seeing a Bow Wow Wow video for the first time! And Joan Jett!). I think the Next was the live band playing. A terrific fun night.

The apartment was a four-plex on Pruett Street, and I’m working on a longer post about that, which I’ll get up in a couple of weeks. (That place was—haunted. Yes, with ghosts. Or, a ghost).

Overall, that was a big fun summer, though somewhat challenging with poverty and hod-carrying.

I was young, though, and in Austin, which then and now is a good place to be young. I did well.

​And—I found a more-or-less current google street photo of the building where I worked. The fucking bricks are still there! I might have helped toss some dirt on those trees, too....

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​You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness....

“That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters.  A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth Street and beyond.  This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom.”
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and Synonym for Love.


​Read That Demon Life now!
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Cops Shot Up a Car in 1980 and I was a Witness!

11/20/2020

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So, spring of 1980. I was living on Parker Lane, which I’ve written about earlier.

It was late April, and it was late at night (or early in the morning, depending on how you tell time), and I was doing some schoolwork. Don’t remember what, exactly. That spring I was taking the basic journalism class, a class in Italian Baroque Art, a class in French Film, and a class about the Spanish Civil War. I don’t remember finals in any of the classes—I mostly had to write essays. So I was up late, reading—probably something for the Spanish Civil War class, which had a pretty heavy reading load. And I heard—sirens.

The sirens sounded close.

I got up and looked out the window.

A sedan stopped right below my window. A cop car right behind it. Another cop car went around and stopped in front of the sedan, and a cop got out. Two cops got out of the car behind the sedan.

As the first cop approached the sedan—the sedan tried to pull away!

Bang! Bang! The cop was shooting his pistol into the car!

BOOM! Bang! The cops behind were shooting with shotgun and pistol!

Damn.

The sedan lurched up onto the curb.

I’m standing there in the window like an idiot. My first thought—they’re gonna shoot me! Like, just see me move up here in the window and reflexively shoot me.

I sort of stepped back and peered around the corner of the window.

The three cops went up to the sedan and pulled out the occupants and they beat those guys. Just stomped them.

I went downstairs and out the door to get a closer look. People from the other units were out, too. There was quite a crowd.

More cop cars arrived. An ambulance. Cops tore the car apart—pulled out the seats and tossed everything on the street. Looking for drugs? A weapon? The ambulance took one of the car occupants away. Cop cars took the others away. A tow truck showed up and towed the shot-up car away.

My roommate, TWS, had been across the street at Mother Earth. When the bar closed, he came home and I tried to excitedly tell him what had happened. TWS was unimpressed.

“Lowell, we were witnesses to a murder back in January. Cops shooting a guy is nothing.”


Maybe. Sort of maybe.

When I read the article top left, I called Jim Berry at the American-Statesman to offer my eye-witness account. He didn’t return my call.

Subsequent newspaper stories, below, say the cops got in trouble for shooting up the car. Good.

I wasn’t able to find any resolution on the incident. Nothing more on the guy who got shot, nothing more on the cops.

Probably nothing more happened, and, like most things, the incident was mostly forgotten....

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Where I Lived Then Now V

8/28/2020

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Heathercrest.

(It was Heathercrest then, called Sixth Street West now).

I lived there from January 1985 to June 1988. My apartment was small and cramped and there were roaches (this seems to be a theme in my early Austin residences). I sadly don’t have any antique photos, so all I have are these more or less recent shots from Google Streets.

​Those big hills at either end of the parking lot were kind of cool. During ice storms—and especially during the big snow of January 1985—cars were wiping out all over the place! (That snow was magical—I went for a wonderful walk past all the stalled or wrecked cars down to the Deep Eddy).
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My apartment was on the west side, looking down into a tree-filled ravine. The property line was about two feet from my door—the ravine belonged to the University of Texas, part of some married student housing that was further down the hill.

The ravine—a problem. The people on the second floor of the unit next to me were too lazy to take their trash to the dumpster, so they just tossed bags of trash out their window. There were bags of trash dangling from tree branches and busted on the ground spewing all sorts of nasty shit and attracting rats and raccoons and various vermin.

One night I was leaving with a friend to go see the True Believers and just as we went out the door a bag of trash shot out the upstairs window and tumbled down through the branches to the ground.

“Why are they doing that?” DY asked.

“Assholes don’t need a reason,” I said. One of the few philosophical truisms I’ve ever uttered.

I complained about the trash to the apartment manager, who said the trash was on UT property, so the trash was UT’s problem. I called UT, and whoever I talked to told me that the trash was coming from Heathercrest, so it was Heathercrest’s problem.

The trash tossers eventually moved out and were replaced by a couple of nice young women, Zoe and Caroline (?? I think).  One time we were up all night being bad and I was complaining about the trash, and Zoe said—“Let’s go pick it up!” And so we went out at about 430 in the morning and filled five or six bags of trash and took it to the dumpster.

Good citizens, we.

Heathercrest was crime-ridden.

Every now and then the Statesman would run a crime statistics story, and Heathercrest was always this red dot of violence in the middle of a safe part of town.

Domino’s stopped delivering pizzas there because the drivers got robbed so often!

And I got robbed one night. One evening I came back from the laundry room and literally bumped into some asshole who was leaving the apartment with my jambox.

“Hey!” I said.

“Fuck you,” the burglar said. He took off running.

I didn’t catch him. I called the cops. They came and looked around my apartment. “Wow,” one cop said. “They ransacked the place!”

“No,” I said. “It’s pretty much always like this.”

More crime, and worse: I got jumped and sucker-punched by some thug in the parking lot. Again—coming back from that fucking laundry room. Just some drunk thug. Damn. That hurt—cracked my jaw. I stumbled back to my apartment and got my deer rifle and sat pointing it at the door, but the thug never came after me. I never saw him again—not that I got a good look at him before he drilled me.

That was at the end of April 1988. I moved out in June. Good riddance.

Heathercrest Pros: Interesting traffic during snowstorms.

Hearthercrest Cons: Thugs, trash, robbers, roaches, no pizza delivery.

​Verdict: Stay away.

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You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness....

“That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters.  A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth Street and beyond.  This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom.”
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and Synonym for Love.


​Read That Demon Life now!
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Reading at Malvern Books!

12/29/2019

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Malvern is great! People came, we sold some books. Thanks!
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That One Time I Fell on My Head

6/29/2019

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Lowell Mick White, scarface, scar, handsome, Dobie Paisano FellowScarred!
I suppose you've wondered how I got those handsome scars on my nose....

Well. One night I was at the Deep Eddy drinking beer with MDC, who was down visiting from Alaska, talking mostly about fly fishing. After a while we left the bar to go get something to eat, and crossing the street to where MDC was parked, I was trying to demonstrate a roll-cast pickup—demonstrating with an imaginary fly rod—when I TRIPPED OVER MY STUPID FUCKING UNTIED SHOELACE!

Bang! I weighed about 220 pounds then, and all 220 pounds came crashing down on my poor nose. BOOM! My hands didn’t catch my fall, of course—they were in position to hold an imaginary fly rod. BANG!!!

Did I get knocked out? Maybe. I don’t know. Probably. I guess MDC rolled me over, because I do remember looking up at him, and he seemed concerned.

MDC took me to the Brackenridge ER. There were some cops there, and I heard one of them ask MDC, “So, why’d you beat up your buddy?”

MDC said, “Officer, it was the damnedest thing I ever saw….”

Inside the exam room, the doctor asked, “Is your nose broken?”

Before I could answer he grabbed it and twisted--

OUCH!

​“It is now!” I said.

But it wasn’t. He gave me six stitches and sent me home—without pain meds! No pain meds for head injuries, a nurse explained. That's pretty rude. I'm still mad about that. I was fucking hurting.

MDC dropped me off—I was living in the basement of the Deep Eddy in those days. Don’t know what time it was—it was still dark. I went into my apartment and got my camera and took a photo of the blood I lost. Nice!

Lowell Mick White, blood, pain, head injury, nose, scars, scarface
Somewhere in some box there is a photo of me taken the next day—my face is all swollen and I’m a glorious fucking mess! It’s a great picture. If I ever find it, I’ll scan it in and post it as an update….

​But, anyway, that’s the story of the scars on my nose. I’m quite pleased with them, though I’m still regretful and angry about the lack of pain meds at the time. Pain is no fun, even in memory.


Lowell Mick White, Professed, academia, higher ed, fiction, teaching, novel, bad behavior
But...you know what? You can assuage my pain (past and present, physical and emotional) by buying a book, or by leaving comments on Amazon or Goodreads. Why not start with Professed.​...?

"Professed is a novel filled with the struggles and rivalries and oddities and many weirdnesses American higher education--favor-dodging, ex-girlfriend avoiding, grade-dreading, plagiarist-busting, dissertation-reading, office-mate annoying, litter-box spilling, book-stealing, unprofessional forbidden lusting, unprofessional forbidden lusting-fulfilling, lost cat-chasing, wrist-breaking, inopportune body-betraying, boring boyfriend-dumping planning, dead professor missing, committee-meeting texting, student misfiling, classroom failing, hidden Confederate-history uncovering, book-writing, student advising, professional dysphoria-feeling, drunk-tank loitering, book discussion-leading, unwise nasal behaving, paper researching, non-academic schooling, sink fouling, New Years' kissing, celebratory pool-playing, stranger-disemboweling, paper-writing attempting, paper-writing failing, drinking-game playing, incomplete-taking...yet, as the characters fight to fit into a rapidly-changing institution, medicating themselves as best they can with sex, drugs, and literature, learning actually happens----Somehow."

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    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

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