Category: Where I Lived

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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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.

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:

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:

I was recognized....

Rugay's only trick: "Adore!"

Hero Rugay

Writer at work...?

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.

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!

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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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).

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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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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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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Where I Lived Then—Now (Part II)

5/5/2018

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This is where Redneck Village once stood—Redneck Village, I named it, a collection of a half-dozen or so single-wide trailers fanned out along a circular driveway, on McCall Lane just off 183 South.

I lived here 1978, 1979, just after I moved to Austin. It wasn’t much, but I didn’t want much at the time! I was interested in having adventures, and Redneck Village was an adventure. I kind of liked it.

Austin Speed-o-Rama was down the road, and I got to enjoy going to the stock car races on Friday evenings before heading downtown to do young people things.

Bergstrom Air force Base was just across the road and those RF-4Cs were noisy. Woke me up a lot of mornings. One time I called the base and told them to turn down the noise! But they didn’t….

The landlord’s daughter kept a pack of angry little black dogs that yap-yap-yapped night and day. They were part Yorkie, maybe, but they looked like atomic mutants, so I called then the Atomic Mutant Dogs.

The landlord himself was an old drunk redneck with what appeared to be a serious case of psoriasis. He once asked me how old I thought he was. Like, he looked freaking 90! He looked like he was dead! I said, “Oh, fifty-five or so.” He laughed and laughed—said he was 57.

If you go straight through those trees in the photo—straight into the past, as well—you could see the screen for the Rebel Drive-In, the famous porno outdoor theater. I couldn’t see the screen myself—there was a trailer in the way—but if I went outside and walked around the other trailer, I could see giant phalli marching across the horizon. The landlord’s grandson, Little Kevin, was in middle school, and he set up folding chairs on the roof of one of the trailers and charged his classmates to climb up there and watch porn through binoculars….

The AC didn’t work very well and it was hot and those jets were noisy and the landlord thought I was a radical troublemaker and the Atomic Mutant Dogs were yapping nonstop and those kids on the roof were creepy and when I moved out I didn’t get my damage deposit back and it’s all gone now!

drinking, sex, drugs, bad behavior, Austin, lust, laziness

You might be interested in my novel of Austin, That Demon Life....a novel of lust and laziness...full of drinking and sexing and various bad behaviors....

“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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Sleazy Rumdum Bars!

4/14/2018

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When people talk about the lost bars of Austin, the places that usually come up are Liberty Lunch and the Armadillo World Headquarters, and both those places are full in my memory of fine interesting people and stories. But there are other interesting lost places, too—does anyone remember the Alamo Lounge? The Malamute Lounge? Paula’s Playpen? TA Station?

Does anyone remember the sleazy rumdum bars on the 200 block of Congress?

Oh, the sleazy rumdum bars! They would open at 7am, which was perfect for a young ne’er-do-well heading home after a long night of misadventure. They were unheated in the winter and barely air-conditioned in the summer. They were full of story-telling people down on their luck with no place else to drink.

A few things that happened there:

We got kicked out of the Dew Drop Inn after we loaded up the jukebox with all the quarters we had and played nothing but “Kung-Fu Fighting.”
We got kicked out of the Dew Drop Inn a couple of months later when we loaded up the jukebox with all the quarters we had and played nothing but “Roxanne.”
The Veteran’s Day Parade in 1979, just after the Iranian Hostage Crisis began, and the barmaid from the Stop Inn (we just called it BEER because of the sign on the front) was crying, “I just want to go off with the cowboys! I just want to go off with the cowboys!” (The guys on horseback weren’t cowboys but mounted soldiers from Fort Hood).
That barmaid from the Stop Inn/BEER—she was from England. How did she get to the US? And how did she get to BEER?
Playing pool at the Tradewinds and I was aiming at the 8-ball, and a fight broke out between two women. A serious boom bang brawl, and the women were grappling and cursing and gouging and rolled across the pool table, and I paused my shot until they rolled off the table to the floor and out of the way—and then I made my shot, unperturbed.
An old guy at the Tradewinds (old-seeming then but probably younger than I am now) who knew where the gold was. The gold—in the Sierras east of sacramento somewhere. He knew where is was, and thought we should pool our resources and go pan it out of the streams. Putting together the plan took a long time and a lot of beer. “We’ll need a dog,” the guy said. (We ended up not pooling our resources, not getting a dog, not going to the Sierras, and the gold is still there).
My birthday, 1980, when my roommate woke me up to go to the bars with the immortal line, "Lowell, you have to transcend the bullshit!"

As always, I relate these stories for your edification, not your emulation….

(Photo from the Austin History Center).

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Where I Lived Then—Now

3/31/2018

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Mankato Minnesota boyhood home sad house

Mankato, Minnesota. I lived here from 1965 to 1976.

The house was painted pink when we moved in. My dad painted it gray—a different shade of gray than this, in my memory—and added the shutters. He painted the shutters red—my mom said she’d always wanted to live in a gray house with red shutters.

It’s in a good location, just a few blocks from the university (Mankato State College in 1965, Minnesota State University-Mankato now). I walked to my school, which is now closed, the building used by the university. The garage is prob a bit small for contemporary tastes. Looks like someone widened the driveway to accommodate two cars.

Those maple trees in front are nice! They were the biggest trees on the street when I moved away, in July 1976, and they’re even bigger now. Good for the trees. There were shrubs of some sort along the front of the house—one of them died sometime in the mid-70s and in the chaos of that time was not replaced. I guess the others died since then.

That’s my bedroom window on the right corner. I kept the blinds down always—I wanted it dark in there, though I would usually keep the side window open and my cat could come and go as he pleased.

This was an unhappy house—well, no, the house itself is neutral, of course. It's just a thing. But it was certainly a house filled with unhappy people—filled with anger and tears and depression. Still, I’m cheered now that whoever lives there is taking care of it. Looks good!

(photo from Google).

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Ordinary Horrors

Where I Lived Then Now VII: Wayne, Nebraska

Where I Lived Then Now VI: The Haunted House

Where I Lived Then Now V

Where I Lived Then Now IV

Where I Lived Then Now (III)

Where I Lived Then—Now (Part II)

Sleazy Rumdum Bars!

Where I Lived Then—Now

Lowell Mick White

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