Category: Memoir

Where I Lived Then Now VII: Wayne, Nebraska

12/17/2021

This is 908 Circle Drive in Wayne, Nebraska. I lived here for about a year and a half—1964, 1965—while my dad taught at Wayne State College.

A lifetime later, in 2010, I visited Wayne on a job interview, and of course had to drive by the old homestead. Aren’t childhood houses supposed to be smaller when you see them as an adult? This place seemed—bigger. I think someone at sometime added a room or two onto the back...? Those trees didn’t exist in 1965! (That curved-trunk tree might have). But there still wasn’t much grass…My bedroom was at that window on the far right.

In 2010 the house was for rent at that time—I thought, If I get the job, would it be weird to live here…?

A voice answered—Yes, Lowell, it would be very fucking weird.

(I did not get the job. Which is a good thing! (No offense, Wayne State)).

This house below—the house next door—didn’t exist in 1965—it was a vacant lot

After seeing The Beverly Hillbillies for the first time, I went out there with a shovel and started digging for oil.

There was no oil.

This is at the top of Circle Drive’s circle. An older kid named Todd lived here. Sixth grade, seventh grade. He was kind of a perv, and was friends with a kid named Stanley who was a serious goddamn pedo. All us first graders tried to stay away from them…..

When I tell an imaginary kid to go out and play in the ditch, I’m not being mean. This is what we kids did in Wayne! We played in the goddamn ditches! It was fun!

Look at this ditch above!

Doesn’t seem like much—I think it’s been filled in. But 55 (!) years ago it was pretty deep—about head-high on a first grader. We could play army in the ditches, hide from the pedos, if girls were around we’d play Family (I always got delegated to be Brother, which was uninspiring). The ditches led to culverts that ran under the streets, and those were cool and scary, too—you could hear cars thumping overhead….

I’ve only written one story set in Wayne. It’s about playing in the ditches and storm sewers and hiding from the pedos…and it sadly doesn’t work. POV problems. Maybe I should figure out a way to fix it….

During my 2010 job interview, the chair of the hiring committee was driving me around town, and we went past a grim little house….

I said, “Back in first grade we thought that house was haunted….”

The chair blanched. “My kids think that house’s haunted, too!”

Maybe the whole town is haunted?

This is haunted America….

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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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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).

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.

Bite me, "History."

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Another Stupid Job: Wolfe Nursery

10/16/2020

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Wolfe ad, 03/13/1982

Several years ago I was on an AWP panel chaired by the late great Larry Heinemann. The theme of the panel was work and jobs, and how these basic human endeavors affects and influences us as writers. Larry thought it was a good idea to introduce the panel by listing each job the panelist had had in their lives. The panel was at 800am (insane!) and I remember sitting there hungover and tired and feeling more and more depressed as Larry introduced me and read through the list of 17 jobs I had given him. I sat there thinking I have made some bad fucking life decisions….

(Then I got up and gave the worst presentation I’ve ever given, but that’s another story…).

(And of course bad life decisions make for good literature, maybe).

So, anyway—this is one of those bad life decisions. Wolfe Nursery. I worked at the south location for about four months in 1982. I sold shade trees, unloaded trucks, did whatever the stupid bosses told me to do—I even mopped the floor once (a fiasco).

I sold a magnolia tree once—got a $30 commission. Yay! Real money for broke-ass me.

Much of my time was wasted unloading trucks of fertilizer and peat moss. There was a competing nursery just on the other side of Ben White and we used to denigrate their manhood because they used forklifts to unload their trucks. We used our backs! We used brute strength!

A semi would back into the soil additive section, and three guys would get to work—one up on the flat bed of the truck, one in the middle, and a stacker on the end. The truck guy would peel the 40-pound bags of sheep or cow shit off the pallet (peel because the plastic bags would stick together) and toss the bag to the guy in the middle, who would spin and toss it to the stacker, who would arrange the bags into an orderly, stable stack. The middle job was the best, I thought—you could sort of catch the bag in mid-air and flip it to the stacker without too much effort. The truck position was the worst—you had to pull those bag up and throw them.

Three of us on a job like that on a fully-loaded semi? Five or six hours.

And at the end of a shift—yeah, you smelled like you’d been working in the soil additive section.

Selling shade trees was better. Or selling roses! Or just about anything else.

I see in this ad the little box for “spring bulbs.” Yeah, I remember those fucking things. There were crates and crates of bulbs, and each bulb was in a little cellophane packet closed off with a tiny tight rubber band. It was my task, one rainy afternoon, to remove those rubber bands. Hundreds of them. For four hours or so. I was cross-eyed by the time I finished.

After work I stopped by the Deep Eddy for a beer or ten, and I was complaining about my day. Peter Nye said, “You realize that on the other end there was some guy putting those rubber bands on, right?”

And I did realize that! I had actually spent the cross-eyed afternoon thinking that we were all victims of the vast capitalist conspiracy! That this work was meaningless, that my labor would never be adequately compensated….

I was happy when they laid me off in May.

Yeah, look at it.

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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.

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.

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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Where I Lived Then Now IV

9/15/2018

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Austin, Lowell Mick White, That Demon Life, Deep Eddy, best Austin novel

The 700 Club.

I lived there 1980-1981. My apartment was small and cramped, and there were roaches. My apartment was on the other side of this recent Google Streets photo, on what we called The Elite Inner Circle (it wasn’t a circle, more like an ∟), on the second floor, looking out into the upper branches of a big live oak.

I chose the 700 Club because of its location—on East Riverside I’d had easy access to beer and fast food, and the 700 Club was close to beer--The Deep Eddy Cabaret, which became a big part of my life for many years. I went out and saw bands and did youth things several nights a week--to Club Foot, Raul's, Duke's, the Alamo Lounge, the last days of the Armadillo--but the Eddy was where I hung out.

My neighbors were a mixture of old people and students. There was a WWII ex-POW who spent much of his time loud and drunk. There was a woman who spent much of her time typing—you could hear her out in the courtyard under the big oak, and I liked to think she was writing a novel, my friends thought she was “just practicing,” while in reality typing was probably her job. There were a couple of Scientologist bikers. Just before I moved out there was a pleasant man and woman, both married but not to each other, who kept an apartment for afternoon trysts.

For a while there was a massive ex-convict living in the apartment below me who one night got mad and started pounding on his ceiling—my floor—with a broom handle. I was sitting with a couple of friends trying to watch the baseball playoffs. After a while we called the cops, and a pair of cops talked to the convict, and then came up to talk to us. “He’s not really rational,” one of the cops said. “If he comes to your door, don’t let him in.”

Good advice there, chief.

(The convict later disappeared—a parole violation, I think.)

The big event that happened that year was the Memorial Day Flood.

We had a barbecue that Sunday afternoon, as we often did, with chicken and ribs and beer and what-all, and the day was cloudy and humid and no one expected it to rain—the newspaper forecast said there was only a slight chance of rain.

Lowell Mick White, Austin, weather forecast, Memorial Day Floor, That Demon Life

But about the time the food was ready it did rain, not hard but enough sprinkles to force us to move from the courtyard up to my apartment. And after we ate, several of us walked down the hill to the Eddy.

The great KB was tending bar that night and we drank beer and played pinball and some of us watched the Indy 500 and then it began to storm—really storm. We stood in the doorway and watched the lightning show for a long time and drank more beer and played more pinball until it was closing time and KB forced us out into the rain and we walked up the hill in the storm. Notorious TWS came over to my place and we ate barbecue and watched Bridge on the River Kwai until TWS got sleepy and headed back to his house. None of us had any idea what was taking place elsewhere in the city….

I moved out a couple of days later. My lease was up and I went off to spend a few weeks with my grandparents. When I came back in August I moved into the building next door and into another story….

700 Club pros: Close to the Eddy.

700 Club cons: Roaches, tiny, cramped.

700 Club verdict: It was okay.

Lowell Mick White, Austin, Memorial Day Flood, That Demon Life, best Austin novel

Photo taken the day I moved out--probably May 27...

That Demon Life, Lowell Mick White, lust, laziness, Best Austin Novel

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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, 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.”

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, 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)

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.

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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

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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