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Ordinary Horrors

Election Day(s), 2000

11/6/2020

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Biden has taken the lead in our current election—a good thing!—and is likely to win. But here’s a memory of an election that went—the wrong way.

The stolen 2000 election. I’m still traumatized by that fucking thing.

I was driving a cab in those days. I went and voted (my man Gore!) and then hit the streets, hoping to make good money. And I did! It was very busy. Lots of activity.

At one point in the evening I was dropping off a journalist (from New York Magazine, I think) at the Governor’s Mansion. I was dropping him off on the Guadalupe side, and he was paying, when around the corner came a battalion of drunk frat boys chanting “Bush! Bush! Bush!” One of them had uprooted an unfortunate bit of shrubbery and was waving it around. And there were many other trips, and the night went on, and it got cold and rainy, and my cab was acting hinky—stalling and lurching.

Around 10pm I was going by the Governor’s Mansion again, and a DPS trooper flagged me down. I pulled over. One of the drunk frat boys—well, a drunk frat boy—was with him. “This guy’s had too much to drink,” the trooper said. “Can you take him home?”

That’s always an unpleasant thing to hear. But, yeah, I took the kid. At Guadalupe and MLK he bailed on me. A fare jumper! I pulled out my maglight and took off after him—I was going to smash the little fucker—but he dodged into a convenience store and cowered by the cashier and I didn’t want to smash him in front of witnesses and so he got away and he probably voted for Trump this year, the piece of shit.

I drove on. Made more trips. I listened to returns coming in on the radio, and it was grim. Gore conceded. I was bummed.

Then my cab broke down, on MLK by the university. I had passengers in the car—I called for another cab to take them, and then I called for a tow truck for my cab, and then I called for a cab for myself and I left my cab blocking a lane in the rain.

By the time I got back to my apartment more returns were coming in. I got in my personal car, went to the grocery store, and by the time I came back, Gore had unconceded and was ahead.

Judy Woodruff was on CNN being speechless. (This is about the time I stopped watching CNN—their coverage was lame. Over on MSNBC, Mike Brzezinski was scribbling numbers on a whiteboard and Lester Holt was calm and collected).
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Anyway—the election went on for weeks. I was driving days part of the time, nights part of the time.  I was watching tv at home, listening to the radio in the cab.

I drove some Japanese journalists around for a couple of nights. They said they were going to mention me in their story, and they sent me a link—but it was in Japanese, so I couldn’t read it.

One afternoon I was explaining the electoral college to a woman who was confused about the process, and she said—“You sure know a lot, for a cab driver.”

Yeah, fuck you, too.

I was in line out at the airport when Gore made his second concession speech. I was just—fucking sad. And angry.

So much was lost.
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Bite me, "History."
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The Death of Sparks: January 1, 1980

12/30/2019

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​Just about forty years ago, as I write this—the early hours of January 1, 1980—I was witness to the murder of Anthony Noble Sparks.

A cop told me it was the first murder of the decade in the state of Texas.

It was a pretty traumatic event for me—and worse of course for poor Sparks, and for his family, wherever they are.

​I’ve written about it (sort of) fictionally twice—in the story “It May Be a Day, it May Be Forever,” (my first published story, found in the collection The Messes We Make of Our Lives), and in the novel Professed. I’ve never written about it factually, in a historical/personal context, though maybe I will at some point.
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Some memories:
  • My roommate, TWS, and I went down to San Antonio for a New Years’ party given by one of his fellow Jell-O salesmen. TWS thought ahead and brought a change of clothes—I didn’t….
  • After midnight we left the party and went driving around looking for a bar. We came across the New York Pub. TWS said, “A taste of the Big Apple in the Heart of Texas!”
  • We went in to play some pool—and things happened.
  • The morning after the murder we took our hangovers (and my aching face) down to Mi Tierra for breakfast. I was still wearing my clothes from the night before and was soaked—caked!—in Sparks’s blood, and while we waited for a table fucking flies kept landing on me.
  • (The blood: TWS did CPR on Sparks, but somehow I got way more blood on me!)
  • After breakfast we went to the cop station to be good citizens and report what we’d seen.  We told the cop managing the desk that we wanted to give a statement about a stabbing we’d witnessed. The cop said, “Stabbing? We had a hundred stabbings last night and fifty shootings. You’ll have to be more specific.”
  • When TWS said we’d been at some place called the New York Pub, the cop looked at a list and said, ”Oh—upstairs, homicide.”
  • Upstairs we met with two cops—one, African American and young and well-dressed, and one middle-aged and rumpled and bleary with a huge rum-dum nose. I thought—it’s like these cops came from TV!
  • The old cop asked, “What the fuck were you doing at the New York Pub? We don’t go there, and we have guns!”
  • And there was no real answer to that other than the stupid truth—we left the party and went out to play the first pool game of the decade.
  • The cops showed us photos of poor Sparks naked on a slab—the wounds in his chest.
  • TWS looked away, said, “Jesus! You guys do this every day?”
  • “Twenty-four hours a day,” the handsome cop said. He took a drag on his cigarette, then exhaled. “Three hundred sixty-five days a year.”
  • Just like TV!
  • Police later arrested a guy named Jesse Vasquez for the murder. We were told he’d been turned in by his sister. Apparently he’d stabbed several other people earlier that evening.
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A few years ago I was in San Antonio and found myself a few blocks from the murder scene. I went looking for the New York Pub. I found the address, but the building was totally different—remodeled beyond recognition or just replaced. It was vacant. Where's Spark's ghost?

​Does anyone but me think about Sparks forty years on?
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Twelve Things I Remember About Home

6/16/2018

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Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
1. The Mispunctuated Town
Cox’s Mills is a tiny place, even for West Virginia, with a population of maybe 75, two stores, a post office, a closed schoolhouse, and a church that holds services one Sunday a month.  It lies stretched out along Rt. 47, following Pike Fork between Horn Creek and Hog Run.  Cox’s Mills is “five miles from everywhere,” my grandfather used to say, if everywhere is defined as the surrounding communities of Burnt House, Auburn, Troy, and Alice.  Alice is a ghost town anymore, but Cox’s Mills is not too different from the surviving other three, a small community, insulated and static, growing gently shabbier as the years pass.

On the map and in the postal directory the town’s name is spelled Coxs Mills, no apostrophe, apparently because map makers and zip code cipherers don’t like apostrophes.  I’ve always spelled it Cox’s Mills, anyway, because I do like apostrophes and I like things to make sense.  I’ve never heard anyone else offer an opinion about the spelling of the town’s name, and since I go there now only in memory I probably never will.
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory

​2. Millstones and the Bridge Pool
My mother told me that the millstones for Cox’s mills had been just upstream from the bridge where Rt. 47 crossed Horn Creek and I tried several times over the years to find them, wading up the shallow part of the creek under a dark canopy of sycamores and willows, under a water gap and on up.  I never found the millstones, and my guess is that they must have been buried under the silt and fine gravel washing off the hills, buried and lost like so much else.  Below the bridge there was a large, deep pool where Pike Fork flowed into Horn Creek, and I did my first fishing there, catching smallmouth bass and bluegills.  Sometimes I would fish off the bridge abutment, cringing when log trucks or well service trucks from Dowell or Halliburton raced by.  In the lot next to the pool was an olive-painted corrugated metal building, an old gauging station for Eureka Pipeline that my grandfather had worked in.  One damp December day a truck came and loaded up the building and hauled it off somewhere.  In later years weeds grew around the old concrete foundation and multiflora rose snaked around a rusted old steam engine whose original purpose no one could tell me.
 
3. Hunting under the Hickories
I have been told that before the chestnut blight hit the eastern hardwood forests, chestnut trees were where you went to look for squirrels.  It wasn’t unusual to see as many as thirty squirrels working in one tree.  But the chestnuts are long gone, the remaining dead hulks chopped down and used for fence posts, long enough ago now that even the fence posts are gone, even though chestnut made the best and longest-lasting fence posts.  Now the squirrels in our part of the country gather mostly around hickory trees.  The leaves of the hickories turn bright yellow in the fall and stand out between the reds and browns of maples and oaks, and when I went hunting I would sit beneath the trees, quietly, beneath the soft falling leaves and hard falling green nuts.  Squirrel season was the best time of year: the days were cool and usually sunny, and the woods were silent but for the falling leaves and the rustlings of small animals.  One time I heard fallen leaves crackling—something moving—and instead of a squirrel a grey fox came over the edge of the hill.  He trotted right toward me until, when he was six or seven feet away, I said, “Hello, little fox.”  The fox stopped and regarded me for a few moments before angling off, circling around my hickory tree but still heading to wherever he was heading.  I told my grandfather about the fox and he said, “I’d a-shot the son-of-a-bitch.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history

​4. Apple Trees
Below the house, along the creek, we had two immense apple trees.  In a good year the trees would be utterly loaded, groaning under the weight of the apples.  My grandmother would literally spend all day in the kitchen during apple time, canning apples, making applesauce or apple butter, the kitchen windows dripping with steam.  The ground beneath the trees was pocked with holes and tunnels of ground squirrels that ate fallen apples, and beyond the fence, under the rocks, there were snakes, copperheads and blacksnakes, that ate the squirrels.  At night deer would come down off the hill and eat apples, and we could sit in the porch and hear them chewing and sometimes choking.  In the summer of 1988 the trees finally died, and the people who were renting the house cut them down, leaving the stumps standing high enough to run a clothesline from one to the other.  After the trees died I lost interest in the place.
 
5. Farming the Hills
The hills there in that part of West Virginia are hills, not mountains, but they rise so steeply away from the road, away from the creek, that they hem in the sky and induce a sense of confinement if not claustrophobia.  I remember my mother telling about her first trip away from home, to Iowa to visit relatives, and how sick the prairie landscape made her: All that space!  There was nothing around to hold up the sky!  No doubt flatlanders would get sick in Cox’s Mills, and feel trapped and nervous.  In the days of my grandfather’s youth, the hills were still covered in virgin timber.  His family—and the other pioneer families over along Rocky Fork and Old Field Fork—would work their way through the woods, uphill and down, cutting down the trees, selling the solid old timber, burning the rest, rooting up the stumps with mules, planting wheat the first year, corn the second, then grass for cattle, working on and on through the woods.  He said the hills were so steep they had to plant the seed corn with shotguns—just stand back and fire it into the hillsides.  But all that ended.  Farming was difficult at any time in that country, a crazy idea, really, and impossible after the topsoil washed away, and so the farms died out and the trees came back, slowly, thin young forests that have grown more robust over the years.  Still, my grandfather would say, “By God, when the Russians take over, they’ll have people out working on those hills again.”
 
6. My Palm Prints in Concrete
Sometime in late 1962 my grandfather poured concrete for a new walkway that led around the front of the house, from the front door to the East Porch.  We were down that weekend and he had me put my hands in the cement to make a mark.  I remember the icky texture of the cement—it was cold, and sticky, and I didn’t like it.  My father took a nail and wrote my name and the date beneath the palm prints, and I guess it’s all still there.  At least, it was when I finally sold the house.  The concrete had buckled, bulged up by the roots of a maple tree, but my prints endured, faint and shallow but legible.
 
7. Our Hill
When I was very young my grandfather ran cattle on the front of the hill, the side that faced the house, and the cattle grazed the hillside down to short grass, dirt and a few blackberry vines.  After he got rid of the cattle the hill began to regrow.  Brush—filth, we called it—took over, mostly thorny multiflora rose and more blackberries, then a few trees began to poke through, sycamores at first and then maples and oaks.  The top of the hill had been left wooded and was very dark and shady, and you would pass through those first woods and come out on a flat, more or less open area that had once been a planted field.  Rocks had been pulled out to let the plow through, and were piled at the upper end.  We had peach trees up there (peaches down below by the creek would not bear fruit), short lived trees that were all but dead by the time I began exploring the woods.  The dead trees stood for years like skeletons until they began to rot and collapse into the brush.  From the top of the hill you could see miles of land that was empty, used very hard in the past and now all but unsettled.
 
8.  The Hay Barn and the Meadow
Directly across the creek from the house was a small hay meadow and an old barn.  We used to get two cuttings a year off that land until people started running fewer and fewer cattle and no one bothered to come by and cut it.  The grass would grow and fall over, pushed down by rain or pulled down by gravity, and there would be wide trails through it where deer would pass to get to the apples.  The old barn where the hay was stored grew more and more decrepit over the years and became a home for yellow jackets and snakes.  When she was dying, my grandmother would look out the window at the meadow, the wasted hay, and one time she said, “It makes me sad looking out there at that. You know some old cow’ll be wanting that hay this winter.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
Coxs Mills, Appalachia, West Virginia, history, memory
9. Pike Fork
On the maps the upper part of the creek is called Coxcamp Fork, but I never heard anyone call it that.  The local name was Pike Fork, but I never heard anyone use that, either, at least on regular basis.  It was just “the creek.”  It ran through our property, separating us from the hill.  As a child there in the summers I usually spent all day down in the creek looking for fossils, catching crayfish or trapping minnows.  It never occurred to me to be lonely.  I would be down at the creek all day, and then in the evenings I would go back up to the house.  At night fog would drift down from the hills, and I always sat out on the porch and listened to the creek run, and I could hear crickets and frogs and other animals, and I could hear owls hoot, and deer stomp around by the apple trees, I could hear all the thick dark night noises, and once I saw a snake crossing the road in the headlights of an oncoming car.
 
10. High Water
In high water people upstream would throw trash into the river, sometimes plain garbage but more often large chunks of wood that were too expensive or impractical to haul off, like rotten lumber or trimmed tree branches or brush.  As a very young child the junk in the high water always excited me—I imagined the old logs and boards as naval vessels, battleships—a fleet attacking the minnows!   In very high water the creek would stretch clear across the meadow to lap at the base of the apple trees, and though our house was high enough up on the hillside that it never got flooded we could feel the rumble of the muddy brown water as it pushed downstream. 
 
11.  The Langford House
The Langford house was across the road and down a bit.  The Langford family was long gone, died out or moved away, and the house was rented out occasionally to very poor families, until at last it grew too dilapidated and run down to rent to anyone.  One night, after it had been vacant for a several years, my grandmother claimed she saw the house all lit up—glowing in the dark.  My grandfather dismissed her, said she was probably dreaming, but I suspected ghosts.  By that time I was living away from Cox’s Mills, and I was familiar with ghosts—not just the ordinary spirits that might take over a property, but ghosts that got inside your head, ghosts not only of the dead, but of the living, too, ghosts of family and ghosts of place, ghosts that can follow a person around and bother them with guilt and shame and regret that cannot be exorcised.
 
12. The Tree that Didn’t Fall Until Later
It was late when I arrived home for Christmas in 1981, driving in from Texas, and I was very tired, and I was hungry, and I wanted to sit around and decompress, but my grandfather was all agitated and he was saying “Where’d you park?  Out by the barn?  Well, you get out there and move your goddamn truck, there’s a tree a-going to fall on it.”  He followed me out into the dark and pointed across the road into the night.  He said there was a big tree over there that had been struck by lightning and might fall any moment.  So I moved my pickup.  The next day I could see a big oak that been indeed struck by lightning—there was a pale vertical stripe running the length of the tree where the bark had split away.  But the tree didn’t fall—not then, at least.  Years later when I sold the house I came by to take one last look around, and the new owner was walking me out to where I was parked.  He was a nice man, retired and living alone, and he said he would take good care of the house.  “I know all your family’s memories are wrapped up here,” he said.  By that time everyone was dead and I didn’t really care, or thought I didn’t.  I didn’t say anything.  Then I looked up across the road—and the lightning struck tree wasn’t there!  It had finally fallen, not down the hill but across it—but, still, the damn tree had finally rotted and keeled over, and for some reason I just didn’t know what to make of it.  I stood there for a while, staring dumbly at the hillside, and then I got in my truck and drove on back to the new home I was trying to make in Texas.
 
(Originally published in You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Summer 2008)
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
NOTE: I decided to republish this little West Virginia essay as part of the run-up to the release of my West Virginia book, Burnt House.

​BUY IT NOW!
novel, Burnt House, Appalachia, West Virginia, family, gothic, reading, Lowell Mick White, best WV novel
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Where I Lived Then Now (III)

6/2/2018

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window to pee from, crime-ridden neighborhood, My Sharona, Mother Earth, beer, fun
This is where I moved after Redneck Village—the Tivoli apartments just off Riverside. My roommate was the infamous/legendary TWS and we had many adventures. My bedroom was in the center unit shown, and my window was that double one not quite over the front door.

The photo below is more or less the view from my window—that large flat surface is the roof of a strip mall and was, in 1980, the roof of Mother Earth, after it relocated to East Riverside. In the winter and spring of 1980 “My Sharona” was a big hit and all the cover bands at ME played it—ALL the bands! Every evening when I was trying to study the opening quickly-tedious bomps of “My Sharona” would come thumping up across the street and through my window…
Austin, Mother Earth, youth. beer, fun, 1980
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Mother Earth, the people you want to be with, beer, happy hour, Austin, 1980
But—I loved Mother Earth. I’d go over for happy hour two or three times a week. It was cool and dark, and there were a bunch of middle-aged drunk regulars, and I enjoyed hearing their stories. Blind Bobby Doyle played piano on many nights—he was really good. Sometimes I’d stay on into the evening, sometimes I’d go home to do classwork, and on other nights I’d head on out to Antone’s or the Armadillo or wherever. Mother Earth was great.

And—there was another bar in the strip mall, TA Station, and a Conan’s Pizza, and a Safeway. Up the street was the Back Room and Paula’s Playpen. So there was plenty of food and beer and fun.

One night TWS and I were out and about, one our way to Spelman’s, and some cops pulled us over on West 6th, just past Lamar. TWS was driving. The cops made him walk the line, touch his nose, etc. The cops said that while TWS had obviously been drinking, he wasn’t drunk drunk. But he needed to go home—and so we drove back to our place, with the cops following. And then, of course, we walked across the street to Mother Earth. Austin!

There was some crime in our neighborhood, too. Someone (?) left the patio door open one night and we woke to find that TWS’s coin jar had been stolen, along with a few dollars I’d stupidly left sitting out. And then I got the battery stolen out of my pickup—not once but three fucking times, and the third time the thieves also cut the fucking battery cable, which was a pain to replace. And then someone(s) stole the license plates off my truck!

Oh—that window in the top photo. There was a kid named KH who used to come crash on our couch, and I got tired of him hanging around. One morning after Mother Earth closed he was out there knocking on the door—and so I urinated out the window on his head. Ha!

Also that window—one night in late April or so I was studying and heard police sirens, and then saw flashing lights. I looked out my window. A car was pulled over right in front of my place. There were also two cop cars with three cops. As one cop approached the car, it tried to get away. Bang! Bang! BOOM! The cops opened fire on the car—two pistols and a shotgun. Whoa! Then the cops pulled the people out of the car and beat the shit out of them. I went outside to watch, along with most of my neighbors. 

So, overall…

East Riverside pros: easy access to beer and fast food, a window to pee out of.

East Riverside cons: crime, KH, police shooting people, “My Sharona.”

Verdict: my least favorite Austin residence.
best novel set in Austin. best Texas fiction, lust and laziness
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, 
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I Visit a Texas Grave

7/16/2017

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Below is a photo I took of the grave of J. J. “Jake” Pickle (1913-2005), who from 1963-1995 represented Texas’s 10th Congressional District—back when that was Austin’s district, before solidly liberal Austin was gerrymandered into five different conservative districts. Pickle was a fraternity brother of John Connally at the University of Texas, and it was Connally who got him a job working in Lyndon Johnson’s congressional office. In the 50s he was a partner in Johnson’s radio station.

During my Austin cab driving days, I had Pickle as a passenger.

It was in 1998, I think. I picked him up at a condo in Tarrytown. He was standing at the rounded tip of a cul-de-sac, and I swung the cab around so that the rear passenger door would be right in front of him. But he lurched backwards, almost fell down. When he got in the car he said, “You frightened me—I thought you were going to run me down!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Where do we go?”

“I need to go to Governor Shivers’s house,” Pickle said.

Uh, what? It sounded like the poor little old man actually wanted to go visit Shivers, who had been governor back in the 50s and died in the 80s. But then I realized—oh, the Shivers Mansion. The University of Texas owned it and used it for meetings and receptions and whatever. So, okay.

It wasn’t very far away. I got there without difficulty. The fare was $4.75.

Pickle handed me a five dollar bill.

“Now,” Pickle said. “I want you to keep a little something of that for yourself!”

And I did.

A very little something.

Pickle is buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. (And, no—I don’t understand the watermelon).
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Desk Drawer of the Past

1/9/2016

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I always seem to find amazing and wonderful  (to me, at least) things when I clean out drawers or unpack almost forgotten boxes. So while clearing out a desk drawer last night I was delighted to find internet software from Southwestern Bell, my first internet provider.
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Dial-up Netscape. There were some 3.5 floppies in that package, too, but they seem to have disappeared....
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This is what Southwestern Bell wanted us to do with the internet.
I found other delightful items, too--perhaps this will be a series....
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This Happened: Three Flat Tires at Once

12/11/2014

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Guilford, CT. May, 1983.

There also seems to be a problem with the muffler--or lack of muffler....
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Forgotten Children

1/13/2013

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Newsboys
I was looking for something on the wonderful National Archives website—now I forget what—when I came across these photos of child laborers.

I’ve written before of my interest in archival photographs, and about my fascination with forgotten people, people who have lived and died and are now—lost to history.

And here at the National Archives, a whole trove of forgotten children.

The photos were taken for the National Child Labor Committee between 1908 and 1912 by Lewis Hine. They are just amazing—pictures of a lost world, filled with lost people.

What scary photos! these poor kids, doing hard work that would kill me if I even tried to do it. The moments of interrupted narrative that are captured here—what is going on? Who are these people? What happened to them? I'll never know: the people are gone, though their images live on to haunt me....

National Child Labor Committee photographs

National Child Labor Committee

Lewis Wickes Hine

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Oyster shucker
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Spinners in a textile mill
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Berry picker
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Objects and Memory, Again

7/5/2012

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And so the packing for my impending move to Kansas continues, and I came across this t-shirt:

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My psychic powers tell me, dear reader, that you have  two questions about this object.

The first question is, How Did You Acquire the Shirt? 

In October of 2000 I was driving the cab early one morning, and I got a call to the emergency room at St. David’s Hospital. When I pulled up, a guy and two young women came out and got into the car. The guy was wearing a jacket but no shirt, and was carrying this shirt and a plastic bag. One of the young women told me he’d been in the ER to be treated for alcohol poisoning. The plastic bag was a vomit bag. I told them that if he vomited in the cab, there would be a $100 cleaning fee. The girl said he was all vomited out and empty.

So I drove them all back to the frat house, while the young women cooed over “poor Steve.”

Poor Steve indeed. I told them that "Back in my day, we didn't get alcohol poisoning!"

They didn't say anything--either they were speechless, or unimpressed.

And when I cleaned out my cab at the end of shift, I found that the guy had left the shirt behind.

The second question is, Why Did You Hang Onto the Shirt for So Long?

It was a perfectly good shirt. I washed it and even wore it a few times. Then it went into a box the last time I moved. I think for me objects acquire a sort of flypaper-like stickiness that holds onto memories—in this case, a memory of the cab days, and a memory of a drunk-ass kid who couldn't hang. Though there is also no doubt some laziness involved, and a poor job of packing during my 2003 move.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure that I can retain the memory without the shirt.

And the shirt is now in the dumpster….

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LBJ Who?

6/9/2012

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I’ve been amused in recent weeks that people are referring to talented but no-heart basketball player LeBron James as “LBJ.”

I suppose this reference has been going on for some time—no doubt I just noticed it because I’ve been caught up in reading Robert Caro’s splendid Johnson biography, The Passage of Power, and because of the NBA playoffs are going on.

For me—perhaps because of the Caro book, perhaps because I’ve lived in Texas for 30-(very)-odd years, or maybe just because I’m old—LBJ will always mean Lyndon Johnson. It doesn’t even mean Lady Bird Johnson, Linda Bird Johnson, Luci Baines Johnson, or Little Beagle Johnson. For sure, it doesn't mean LeBron James.

Though I’m also aware that you can’t fight popular culture. And also the photo below is funny.
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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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