Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (27 page)

When Naishtat reported to his draft board in that year, he learned that an alternative to Vietnam was Volunteers in Service to America—VISTA. So instead of fighting the war in Vietnam, he opted to fight LBJ's War on Poverty. He was told he'd be doing battle in San Francisco. Life, he reckoned, was sweet. He had never been west of Pennsylvania and looked forward to the two-week
orientation in San Antonio. The sweetness came to a screeching halt when he learned that he wasn't California-bound after all; he was being assigned to Eagle Pass, a dusty border town on the Rio Grande—roughly equivalent, from Elliott's point of view, to half past the end of the world.

“I figured there had been some terrible mistake,” he said. “It looked like Mars. I mean, where were the buildings, the traffic, the noise? I looked around and thought, ‘This is my punishment for not wanting to fight the war.'”

He didn't view it as punishment for long. Brought up in a family with a strong sense of social justice, he saw legal work that needed to be done on behalf of the local community and began to do it—all the while taking relentless ribbing from Texans who found him as curious as he found them.

Gonzalo Barrientos, a former migrant worker who later served as a state senator for twenty-two years after a decade-long stretch as a state representative, became a friend and mentor. Together they organized the first Head Start program in Maverick County.

(Yes, Texas gave us the word “maverick.” The Maverick family refused to brand their cows, so anytime a stray wandered onto their property, the family claimed it.)

Working together, Barrientos and Naishtat brought water lines and sewers to the barrios, they introduced immunization and tutoring programs, and they generally pissed off the existing power structure. They were interlopers, outside agitators. The people might have appreciated them, but a lot of local power brokers didn't.

Texas politics worked its way into Elliott's blood. Not satisfied with the limitations of working at the grassroots level, he set his sights on where the real power lay: making the laws that create social change on behalf of those without the money or the power to alter their circumstances. Texas and its bizarro politics had invaded his psyche.

Texas and politics. Ever a curious combo.

By 1986,
attorney
Naishtat, now a graduate of the University of Texas with a law degree and a master's degree in social work, was working for
Senator
Barrientos, drafting legislation on the same issues they had worked on for VISTA—battered women, improved access to health services, protection for migrant workers, and services for the elderly. But for Elliott the battlefield had changed from barrios to the House floor, which brought him into Molly's sights as her kind of agitator: deceptively understated, truly determined, conscientious, and effective.

There he was, this Jewish kid from New York, who never meant to stay in Texas a minute beyond his three-year tour of duty as a VISTA volunteer. He would soon meet his best friend, Malcolm Greenstein, a VISTA volunteer who worked in San Antonio and Colorado in the '60s.

Malcolm, a native of Rhode Island, also had some adjustments to make. Nowhere could he find a decent bagel. To demonstrate his grasp of Texas realities, Malcolm made a major move after VISTA: he opened Austin's first bagel shop, Murray's Bagel Nosh—named for his dog.

It was not exactly a resounding success, but not because he didn't produce a worthy product; he did. His bagels were sold at Whole Foods in its early days. He just didn't have much of a grasp of the profit concept—he failed to understand the importance of pricing the product to make more money than he spent.

He and Elliott both ended up living in the Clarksville neighborhood. Guess who was neighborhood association president?

Elliott Naishtat.

The two met and commiserated on their respective Texas experiences. They found they had more than the Atlantic Coast in common. They had traveled extensively in other countries; both were heavily endowed with a sense of social justice; and each subscribed to the notion that if you weren't part of the solution, you were part of the problem.

Malcolm had already established his bona fides as part of the solution with his efforts on behalf of migrant workers in southern Colorado. He was among those who encouraged Elliott to run for the legislature. Word on the street was that the incumbent representative was vulnerable. Egged on by friends and that Don Quixote quest to do good for good's sake, Elliott crisscrossed the Forty-Ninth District, walking door to door, telling people what he believed in and why—going so far as to honestly say he believed in a state income tax, something Texans have rejected for as long as anyone can remember.

“Gonzalo had told me that I had a shot at beating [three-term incumbent] Bob [Richardson] as long as I never talked about an income tax and never told anybody I was from New York,” Elliott says. “I knew I would have to bite the bullet and at least mention the possibility of a state income tax. I had to be honest.”

“Honest” and “Texas Legislature”: words not often employed in the same sentence when describing the state's governing body.

He was especially endearing to Molly for several reasons—he espoused causes she believed in; he chose his battles carefully; and like her, he could get along with adversaries, even when they opposed efforts important to him or teased him about wearing ties that came from the Save the Children project. More to the point, she could always count on the handsome bachelor to round out boy-girl-boy-girl seating at her dining table. Finally, because she didn't like leftovers, she could also count on him to take them home. Elliott, who weighs maybe 150, is a food-consuming phenomenon. I have always suspected him of having the metabolic rate of a ferret.

Once, despite protests from Molly about my penchant for fatty foods, she caved at the mention of my father's smothered chicken in onion gravy. As usual, we needed diners, but not the ones who sit around the table and bemoan the cholesterol content and caloric value of everything on the menu. Every time I hear one of these tiresome monologues I'm reminded of
Babette's Feast
, a wonderfully convoluted tale of food, austere religion and the people who practiced it, and the struggle to absolutely not register enjoyment of anything, let alone food.

Bright green freshly steamed broccoli was Molly's counterweight to my calorie-laden contribution (I wanted to call it my “arteriosclerotic comfort food contribution,” but
Austin American-Statesman
reporter Mike Sutter had already used that description). Although I am partial to thighs, a few breasts were also browned as a concession to those who insisted on white meat.

On our shopping expedition we could find only unusually large chicken breasts. I make this point because Molly wanted her guests to understand why they were cut in half, and that anyone who wanted to double up should feel free to do so. Just the mention of “big smothered breasts” laid the foundation for one tacky crack after another.

After several rounds of bad breast jokes and the usual verbal jousting, the evening wound down. Molly, being true to her diet of the moment, left half of her very large (chicken) breast on her plate, prompting Elliott to gesture toward it, his azure eyes raised in mock supplication. We knew what was coming. In a gesture not unlike a third-grader seeking permission to be excused to the restroom, he at last posed the question we'd all been waiting for.

“Uh, Molly,” he said softly, “you gonna eat that?”

25

FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES AUSTINITES
of a certain political stripe have gathered for Final Friday, a monthly assemblage of politically progressive types. These gatherings, which started out as First Friday, bounced around for several years until there was some concern about the event's survival prospects—at which point Molly stepped in and offered her house until a permanent destination could be established. Her house remained the “temporary” location for more than five years.

I met Molly when Final Fridays were still at La Zona Rosa, a local watering hole that served decent food and music and was once owned by artist/entrepreneur Gordon Fowler. (Gordo, as he is still known to friends, is married to Texas-born, Louisiana-raised blues babe Marcia Ball. Both were close to Molly. Marcia rounded out Molly's memorial service with a rousing performance of “Great Balls of Fire.”)

From La Zona Rosa, Final Fridays moved to Ty and Kate Fain's. When they moved away in 1998 it migrated to Molly's house. You never knew who might turn up. It might be feminist author Gloria Steinem, economist Paul Krugman (before he became a Nobel laureate in 2008), Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), populist judge William Wayne Justice, or Lady Bird Johnson's former press secretary, Liz Carpenter. They moved among the revelers freely and without fanfare.

It was indeed a merry band of political progressives who convened monthly for sing-alongs, slam poetry, storytelling, music making, or just plain old-fashioned conversation. Subject matter might cover state legislature gossip,
small talk about weather, or rants about right-wing crazies or the Bush administration, which were not always mutually exclusive.