God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (27 page)

While this was going on, Speaker Straus wandered over to say hello. He seemed totally at ease, smiling, hands in his pockets. He said, “I guess all the hogs are going to move to Arlington”—which is partly in Stickland’s district. Straus was in no hurry to impose order. He looked at the scrum of impassioned lawmakers around Stickland. “And just think, these are the people responsible for spending $218 billion.”

At the rear microphone stood Drew Springer Jr., a Republican from North Texas, whose district, twice the size of Maryland, is copiously supplied with wild pigs. He proposed attaching an amendment to Stickland’s amendment. It would cut $900,000 in highway funds—the same amount as the hog abatement program—but only in Stickland’s hometown. The measure immediately passed, with undisguised enthusiasm. Stickland pulled his amendment down, but then he charged toward Springer. They met in the middle of the chamber, nose to nose. Stickland is known to carry a concealed weapon, so I was a little worried. But other members separated the two men, and Straus reluctantly gaveled the House to order.

I left before the budget was finally passed, long after my bedtime. By dawn, it was clear that Dan Patrick and the Tea Party had suffered one defeat after another in Joe Straus’s House. Earlier in the session, Patrick had demanded an up-or-down vote on subsidizing tuition for private schools, and it was crushed. A proposal to zero out money for the Texas Commission on the Arts was brushed aside. Governor Abbott’s Texas Enterprise Fund, which he used to lure businesses to the state, would be emptied, and its budget of $43 million would be divided between Child Protective Services and therapy for disabled children. Ken Paxton, the attorney general, would lose more than $20 million from his budget for lawsuits; that money would be redirected to foster-care programs. None of these changes had become law yet; they had to be ratified by the Senate first.

At the end of the night, the exhausted Democrats and Republicans made a deal: the Dems would provide only nominal opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood, which was going to happen in any case; in return, the bathroom amendment was dropped. Other controversial amendments were placed in Article 11 of the budget, a kind of wish list of things to be debated one day. They call Article 11 “the graveyard.”

But in the Texas legislature, the dead have been known to walk.

This tirade was apparently triggered by a local ordinance that requires a permit to cut down a tree with a trunk diameter that exceeds nineteen inches. When Abbott was attorney general and living in Austin, he was infuriated when he had to compensate the city before cutting down a pecan tree that stood in the way of his future swimming pool.

Austin is a city of dogs and bars and food trucks, a pretty city with many quirky passions. At sunset, it is rimmed in refracted light, an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Belt of Venus. William Sydney Porter, a bank teller in Austin before he went to prison for embezzlement and adopted the pen name O. Henry, called Austin “the city of the violet crown.” The hills that serve as a backdrop to the town are covered with junipers that bloom in January, emitting great puffs of red pollen, the source of what is locally called cedar fever. Someone described the citizens of Austin as “valedictorians on antihistamines.”

When Roberta and I moved to Austin in 1980, we were folded into the bird-watching community. It began one day when a neighbor introduced himself; his name was Victor Emanuel, like the king of Italy. He was slender and bald, and strangely limber—he had a habit of crossing his arms behind his back. The neighbor kids were out playing in the front yard with our son, Gordon. Suddenly, Victor froze. “Do you hear that? It’s a yellow-billed cuckoo. I bet it’s up in a sycamore tree with a caterpillar in his mouth.” Sure enough, there was the cuckoo with its dinner, surprised to be noticed. The bird took flight and Victor ran down the street after it, followed by the neighborhood children. Roberta and I looked at each other. It was our first encounter with this particular expression of genius.

Victor is known in the tribe of Texas birders as Hooded Warbler—his totemic bird name. The hooded warbler is a little yellow bird that darts around nervously, as Victor is known to do. The name was bestowed on him by Edgar Kincaid Jr., the father of the Texas birding community, a shy, mostly self-taught ornithologist. Although gentle and elaborately civil, Edgar was a misanthrope who hated to see the damage that humanity was inflicting on the natural world. The bird name he awarded himself was Cassowary, a flightless bird, native to Australia and New Guinea, that stands more than six feet tall and is sometimes labeled the most dangerous bird in the world. When provoked, it leaps up like Jackie Chan and plunges a five-inch talon into its adversary. It has been known to disembowel people.

Edgar lived by himself across the street from the University of Texas in Austin (in a house that now serves as the office of the Michener Center for Writers). He had a terror of burglars, and instead of sleeping in a bed, he made a nest for himself of sleeping bags and bits of furniture. One night in 1985, someone really did break into his house and rob Edgar at gunpoint. Edgar died of a fever a few days later. In the birding community, people say that Cassowary died of fright.

Several years before Edgar passed away, I went birding with him and some of the most notable birders in the country, but not including Victor. We were headed down to Eagle Lake, a national wildlife refuge west of Houston. There are more than six hundred varieties of bird species in Texas, a greater number than in any other state, thanks to its biological diversity and the fact that it sits in the middle of the central migratory flyway. The goal of this expedition was to see the Ross’s goose, which had been spotted among the mass of migratory snow geese that stop over in the rice fields during the winter. We saw pipits and shrikes and sandhill cranes, lots of hawks, and several bald eagles. Among the geese were the Canada goose, the white-fronted goose, and about four million of the aptly named snow geese that covered the field in a wintry carpet, but not a single Ross. “How do you tell the difference between a Ross and a snow goose?” I asked in frustration, after staring through my binoculars for an hour at the goose blizzard. “He’s a little shorter,” one of the birders replied. Edgar added, “And his bill is raspberry colored as opposed to pink.” Those were damn small distinctions.

Another year, Roberta and I went with Victor to the same region to see the Attwater’s prairie chicken do its mating dance. We went into the blinds, built on the grassy prairie, around four in the morning. A century ago, there were about a million of them along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, but the combination of grazing, drought, predators, and urbanization has reduced the wild population to fewer than a hundred individuals.

Just before six a.m., I heard a hollow, ghostly sound like someone blowing in a large bottle. It was the “booming” of the males. In the dimmest light of dawn, I began to discern their movement, ritually challenging one another as they staked out their territory. The rim of the sun appeared on the horizon, inflaming the colors of these splendid birds. The bodies of the males were the shade of brown sugar, with black stripes, the feathers turning maroon at the base of the throat. Bright golden air sacs on the neck ballooned as the males called, and their neck tufts stood up like antlers. Then the chickens began to dance.

One of the males stomped the earth, and the other males—there were nine of them—followed along, in a kind of jig. Then two males charged each other, stumpy tails erect, fluttering into the air and nearly colliding, then retreating to their imagined property lines, staring each other down, beak to beak. During all this commotion, the females—such dowdy little critters to be the object of so much brilliant aggression—strolled by with a studied nonchalance.

After eight, with the sun fully up, the birds dispersed, and we emerged from the blind, dazed by the primitive magic of the performance. We had come to see every tuft of grass, every clod of dirt, as a vital landmark, invested with almost biblical significance, but in the full light of day it was difficult to even locate those signposts.

We spent the rest of the morning spotting eagles and shorebirds, and caracaras, the low-flying, black-and-white falcons you sometimes see in South Texas. As we passed the mass of snow geese, Victor casually noted, “Oh, look, y’all, a Ross’s goose.”

“Where?”

He pointed in the direction of about five hundred birds near a tree line a hundred yards away.

“How can you tell?”

“He’s a little shorter,” Victor said, “and his bill is raspberry colored as opposed to pink. There’s another one.”

Like the Seine in Paris, the Colorado serves as a cultural divide. On the north bank are downtown, the state capitol, and the University of Texas—anchors of a city historically made up of teachers and bureaucrats. The south bank has Tex-Mex restaurants and dance halls. Austin is on the tail end of the dance belt, which starts in Louisiana with New Orleans RB, runs through Cajun zydeco, enters conjunto territory in South Texas, and then encounters the Czech waltzes and German polkas of Central Texas. The medium that the dance music travels through is Catholicism. In North Texas, the Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ hold sway. There’s an old joke that the reason Baptists won’t screw standing up is that somebody might think they were dancing.

When we arrived in Austin in 1980, there were drug dealers and prostitutes along South Congress Avenue. The women stationed themselves in front of the seed and feed store, where you could still buy dyed baby chicks for Easter. That’s all been cleaned up now, but there’s still a defiant residual funkiness that is pretty much all that remains of the city’s unofficial slogan, Keep Austin Weird. We bought a duplex on the south side, in a neighborhood called Travis Heights. Most of the houses on the street, except one, were modest one-story affairs, although there was also a handsome brick semi-mansion belonging to William Broyles Jr., the editor of
Texas Monthly
and my boss at the time, who would later become a notable screenwriter. Molly Ivins lived several blocks away. Despite the celebrity of some of our neighbors, there was an appealing absence of pretense, which was part of the charm of South Austin. (The motto of our side of town, Molly once wrote, should be “South Austin! A Great Place to Buy Auto Parts!”) Our next-door neighbor sold appliances, and next to him was Terrence Malick, the filmmaker, who occasionally walked our kids to school.

East and West Austin are divided by I-35, sometimes referred to as the Interracial Highway. As black and Hispanic families have been pushed out of the east side through gentrification, Austin has become one of the most economically segregated cities in the country. The lack of affordable housing has taken an awful toll on the diversity that made the city so democratic in its youth.

Austin currently has one of the highest rates of start-up companies of any metro area in the country. From watching Austin transform itself into the city it is now, I’ve developed a very Texas theory of how cultures evolve. Mike Levy began
Texas Monthly
in 1973, and it became the seedbed for the literary community. Bill Wittliff, the screenwriter for the epic television series
Lonesome Dove
and a number of successful movies, decided not to move to Hollywood, and his intransigence made it plausible for filmmakers to stay in Austin. Now Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and many others have turned the city into a film capital of international stature. In the fall of 1980, John Mackey started the first certified organic grocery store in the United States. It was not much larger than a 7-Eleven. On Memorial Day 1981, we had the worst flood in seventy years, and the store was practically destroyed. Mackey had no insurance, but neighbors and customers helped clean it up and restock the shelves, courtesy of kindhearted creditors and vendors. By 2005, it had become a Fortune 500 company, called Whole Foods. In 1983, Michael Dell, a freshman pre-med student at the University of Texas, started assembling computers in his dorm room. The following year he incorporated the Dell Computer Corporation, capitalizing the venture with a thousand dollars. What started as “three guys with screwdrivers” now employs 138,000 people. There are more than five thousand high-tech companies in Austin, and they all hark back to that freshman in room 2713 of the Dobie Center dormitory.

In each of these examples, a single individual with a unique vision started a company that became a hub for similar enterprises and in the process transformed the culture. These are stories Texans like to tell about themselves: how imaginative entrepreneurs—not government—conjure up entire industries and create opportunity in the form of good jobs and enlightened communities. Something similar is happening now in the city with the video game industry and national intelligence. There are so many ex-spooks moving to Austin it has become a kind of Texas Abbottabad.

The evolution of the Austin music scene is more organic and harder to explain. On the east side, there was Victory Grill, part of the Southern “Chitlin’ Circuit,” where Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton would perform. In the early 1950s, Bobby “Blue” Bland, then a soldier stationed at Fort Hood, would drive down to sing on amateur night. Rock and roll arrived, bringing Chuck Berry and James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner. On the south side of town was the headquarters for country music, the Broken Spoke, where Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Tex Ritter would play. There was a gas station on the north side, owned by Kenneth Threadgill, a country yodeler who also secured the first license to sell beer in Travis County. In the 1960s he began inviting hippies and folksingers to join his Wednesday-night sing-alongs. Janis Joplin would sing duets with him while she was studying art at the university. Clifford Antone, son of Lebanese immigrants in East Texas, came to UT in 1968, but he dropped out after his first arrest for smuggling pot. The blues club he started, Antone’s, became an institution in the music world. The musicians he mentored, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Clark Jr., would rejuvenate the blues form, creating a distinctive Austin sound.

Then, in 1970, a local band manager named Eddie Wilson was looking for a venue in South Austin and stumbled across a decrepit National Guard armory. He transformed it into the Armadillo World Headquarters, a strange amalgamation of psychedelic, country, hippie, and rock and roll. There were only 250,000 people in Austin then, but 50,000 of them were students. Musicians began moving to town, as if some homing device were summoning them all at once. Jerry Jeff Walker came from New York, Guy Clark from Houston, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan from Dallas. Marcia Ball was on her way from Baton Rouge to San Francisco when her Austin-Healey Sprite broke down in Austin, and she never went farther. Austin already had a flourishing musical subculture, in other words, even before Willie Nelson played the Armadillo in August 1972.

All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas, and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to his home state, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.

Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He’s a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he’s beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie’s Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie’s bus over and “discover” his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.

In 2016, I went to Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic. Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player, invited me on the bus (there are actually three of them in Willie’s entourage; this one was weed free). As Willie has gotten older and even more physically diminished, there’s an existential quality to his performances. Nearly all of his contemporaries are gone. During performances, Willie stands alone in front, with Mickey a couple of steps behind his left shoulder, providing a kind of harmonic commentary. It’s a conversation that has been going on a long time. “This is my forty-third picnic,” Mickey told me.

As he was showing me around the bus, Mickey pulled back the drape on his closet. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, pulling out a gray guitar case. Inside was Trigger, the acoustic guitar that Willie named after Roy Rogers’s beautiful horse. It is perhaps the most famous musical instrument in America, rivaled only by Lucille, B. B. King’s black Gibson, although there have been many Lucilles and only one Trigger. “Here,” Mickey said, handing it to me.

Trigger is really light. It has a big hole near the bridge, worn through by Willie’s pinky and ring fingers. Pick marks have scored the face paper thin. The entire instrument feels sheer, the frets worn down to nearly nothing. It’s been signed many times—Leon Russell used a pocketknife—but the signatures are fading into the patina. If you saw this guitar at a garage sale, you would walk on by. And yet Trigger has somehow maintained its distinctive mellow voice, a sound Willie thought resembled that of his hero, Django Reinhardt, although to me it sounds like Willie himself, twangy and full of character.

I’m in a group that puts up statues in Austin, and our most recent work was a bronze Willie, holding Trigger, that now graces the entry to the
Austin City Limits
studio. I got to pose for that statue, holding a Martin guitar of the same model, N-20. Clete Shields, of Philadelphia, was our sculptor. In 2011, when the statue was cast and delivered to Austin, we covered it with a parachute and stored it in a movie studio until it could be installed. One night, Willie came by for a private unveiling. He was gracious but a little overwhelmed as he exchanged a long look with himself. Bill Wittliff, who is on our committee, explained that what we liked about this piece was its engagement with the audience. “People will come to you,” he said. “Little children will touch your knee and seek your counsel.”

“Do what I say and not what I do,” Willie advised.

We kept the statue in the studio for months, but we couldn’t seem to get Willie to agree on a date for the public unveiling. He was being modest or embarrassed or coy—we couldn’t decide which. Finally, he allowed that he might be free on April 20, 2012. The date didn’t mean anything to me, but Marcia Ball, another member of our committee, guffawed. “Four-twenty,” she said. “You know what that is? It’s National Marijuana Day.”

So we unveiled the statue at 4:20 p.m. on April 20. Willie stood in front of his giant likeness and sang “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”