Only the Strong Survive
(Page 4 of 8)
Radiating east from Jensen and Lyons are the Reverend Charles Jackson’s son’s clothing store, the Busy Bee barbershop, and Lillie’s Shoes for Women. West of the intersection, whores, winos, bums, cardplayers, and drunks sit on stoops, chairs, stools, trash cans and haunches, watching the street. There is usually a domino game in progress. In the alley, behind the shabby storefronts of the pool halls and bars is a wooden corral built from scrap by two-by-fours. Inside are a chair and sofa and a soiled stack of magazines. There are charred logs and ashes from a campfire. This is the al fresco wino lounge-and-bedroom where many will eventually sleep, when the liquor is gone and the debauchery is over.
Kicking a Miller’s beer bottle out of the way, I strolled past the True Level Lodge, where gospel singing rings out from the second story on Sunday nights, and past the old Lyons Theatre, not so long ago one of three busy theaters on Lyons, along with the Roxy and the De Luxe. The Lyons is now the Latter Day Deliverance Revival Center, following the Harlem pattern of converting movie theaters to storefront churches. I was heading toward Pearl Harbor.
You know what?
When you go down to Houston
You’ll learn you some bad news,
You better stay off—Lyons Avenue.
‘Cause you go there, you go there green
Somewhere on Jensen, the last time you be seen.
You know how it is.
Boy, you know how it is.
You know what?
If you ever walk around on Houston’s streets
You like to be real wise
And stay off of Lyons Avenue street
And don’t go down on Jensen nowhere
Because you’re living on luck and a prayer.
You know things happen to us sometimes,
To the best of us and to the worst of us and all this kinda stuff
But you’re asking for it,
Anytime you hit on Blood Alley, Lyons Avenue
Just off Jensen, it ain’t hard to find
All you have to do is go around there and you’ll find cats almost dying,
It ain’t hard to find.*
—“Stay Off Lyons Avenue,” Juke Boy Bonner, former resident of Fifth Ward, 1932-1978.
Once the most dangerous of Houston’s 25,000 intersections, Lyons and Jensen is the crossroads of Pearl Harbor, so named because the blood spilled in the vicinity is comparable to the amount spilled at its namesake December 7, 1941. The saying goes, “There’s cats down there that can’t sleep nights ‘less they killed someone.” Pearl Harbor, Bloody Fifth, Blood Alley. Juke Boy knew them all on this warm September night. He played and sang at the old Club 44 down in Pearl Harbor, his guitar and Jimmy Reed harmonica wail pouring out of the door into the street:
Life is a nightmare, least that’s the way it seems
Full of ups and downs with a valley of shattered dreams.*
Out of the night the people came, pulled toward the black dirge of the blues, down Lyons through the neon, clutching brown bags, heads silhouetted in darkness, their cat eyes like slices of gold caught in the pickup lights of white men looking to buy love from the black sisters on the block.
It’s hard to love one who’s doggin’ you around
And you’re best friend’s stabbing you in the back
And the people are tryin’ to keep you down.*
Dancers were bathed in a single orbit of light, no shadows, no brightness, a hundred midnight mojos working as Juke Boy sang rhythm ‘n’ blues of shabby rooms, hungry nights, bad liquor, lost women, the Man, needle holes, alcohol-soaked brains, eternal blackness.
Looks like life is a nightmare. Say, that’s the way it seems
Lots of ups and downs and valleys filled with skimpy dreams.*
There were dagger-words, and minds exploded—agony ripped loose by woman scent and the mojo, hearts bloody-razored by challenge and threat. Not a tablespoon of slack as the flash of blades cut flesh in a dance of pain. Butcher knives, pocketknives, steak knives, curved-bladed roofing knives eight inches long with a hooked tip for ripping shingles, boning knives that cut like a laser, skinning knives, switchblades. Ambulances line up like taxis.
So full of ups and downs, Oh Lord,
And so many shattered dreams.*
The Life Savers
Fifth Ward’s Fire Station No. 19 leads the other thirty Houston stations in fire and ambulance calls (3892 and 3237 a year, respectively). It ranks number one in sick calls (1035); shootings (179) cuttings (178); obstetrics, usually emergency births (144); beatings (124); false alarms (30); and dead on arrivals (44). Corpses, however, aren’t transported in city ambulances. That calls for a Code 1050 to notify the county morgue. Only the still-living get to ride in the fire department ambulance, usually to the charity hospital, Ben Taub.
The most frequent visitors to Ben Taub’s emergency room are the two emergency medical technicians (EMTs) from station 19, who often make ten speeding, siren-wailing trips during the busiest shift, 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 the next morning. It is a frightening, heart-pounding, sometimes extremely dangerous fifteen and a half hours. While riding ambulance 1119 for two weekends, I learned it isn’t unusual for the EMTs to face death themselves.
“I popped a cap on him [shot him], white man. He a bad nigger and I want him graveyard dead. Get away from heah,” the man shouted, waving a pistol in our direction. We backed off and he got his wish. The week before, a Viet Nam veteran had rushed the two EMTs with a double-bladed ax, thinking they were Vietcong.
Death is the EMT’s mortal enemy. They curse, threaten, bully, challenge, and shake a fist at its presence. This dialogue was between the victim of a shotgun blast and an EMT:
“Oh, God, I’m dying, I’m dying! Momma, dear Momma! Oh, God!”
“Hey, man, I don’t allow that talk in my ambulance. What’s your name, man? Manny? Manny, I have made up my mind you are going to live at least until we get to Ben Taub. Hey, Manny, don’t go to sleep. I’ll knock the shit from you! Hang in there. Grip that stretcher, man! Squeeze that stretcher! You are not going to die.”
EMTs begin as firemen, then receive 240 hours of advanced first-aid courses graduating to a 600-hour paramedic course at the University of Texas School of Allied Health Sciences. But nothing in any class prepares them for walking down dark hallways searching for a shooting victim, not knowing the killer’s whereabouts; or controlling crowds shouting racial obscenities; or stopping a hysterical wife bent on stabbing her husband. And no one ever becomes accustomed to dead or injured children.
Paramedic Glen Morris, a Fifth Ward resident, made the second EMT ambulance run in the city, an obstetrics case delivered successfully to Jeff Davis Hospital, out of station 19 in April 1971. The carnage, death, injuries, sickness, and inhumanity are finally exacting a toll on Morris. He is one of the best, a black man who is an expert paramedic, psychologist, driver, and shucker-jiver. He is tough and compassionate and has had enough of station 19.
“When I get off I play my jazz to unwind and forget. But after seven years, I’m tired, and, you know, people just keep killing each other. And it’s tough on me because I know I’m doing good out here. Most guys are crying to get out of Fifth Ward after a year. I don’t blame them. The Fifth Ward is intense and real, but after so long it’s too real for me. Some months we make over three hundred runs, and I need a station with about a third of that load. River Oaks, maybe.” We talked and laughed about the enormous differences in the two neighborhoods, how the only category in which River Oaks outranked Fifth Ward was “citizen complaints.” Then the phone rang. Shooting. A block north in front of the Hobo Flats Lounge. At 2:30 a.m., it was Friday night’s ninth call.
Two minutes later, the ambulance jerked out of station 19, whirling and screaming light and sound. When we arrived a small group was standing over a black man stretched across the broken sidewalk, his head lying in the weeds. More people slowly walked across the street from the bar. The assailant had run north, across the Southern Pacific tracks. Oscar Perkins, 38, had been shot three times: a small pencil-width bullet hole in his head, another in his throat, still another on his left side. Blood dripped slowly down his face onto a clean brown and white sweater. The crowd was calm and stood as if watching a play.
“That was cold-blooded, man. Brother didn’t lighten up at all. That was sure cold.”
“That’s O.C., man, my cousin. He didn’t do nothin’ to that man, The blood kept shootin’. Sure wanted O.C. dead. Keep breathin’, O.C.”
“They gonna abulancetize him now. Took them long enough to get that half block. What took you so long, brother? Man, that was cold.”
Glen and his partner, Richard Scott, worked quickly, ignoring the gibes. Perkins was conscious and quiet. He shook his head when Glen asked who shot him. Four police cars arrived almost at once. Officers briefly questioned the two EMTs as the crowd vanished into the darkness.
Code Three, a life-or-death run, full tilt with lights and siren. Scotty drove. Glen jammed two huge fourteen-gauge needles into Perkins’ arms to start the flow of Ringer’s lactate, a fluid replacement. He hooked up the positive and negative leads of the Telecare EKG machine to monitor his heartbeat. He talked to the doctors at Ben Taub through headphones and described the patient’s condition. He wrote down the vital signs—pulse, respiration, blood pressure—and the victim’s name and age on the stretcher sheet near his head. Perkins’ left forehead near the bullet wound had swollen to the size of a plum. The blood from the side wound had soaked through the bandage and the institutional-green stretcher sheet and splashed on the floor like raindrops. Perkins’ eyes glazed over, and Glen leaned over him. “Don’t go to sleep on me, man. Stay with me. We’re almost home.”
My Library
