No Promises
For eight years, I had a love affair with Houston. When the good times ended, we drifted apart. But while it lasted, we had the time of our lives.
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We believed we were doing the place a favor. Houston accepted us generously, and we were careless with its generous affection. I remember seeing a Rolls-Royce abandoned on a highway at night with its flashers off, and meeting an architect who smugly explained that the reason Houston’s apartment complexes tended to look like Spanish villas or French châteaus was because “shit sells.” Everyone wanted a piece of the action; every 25-year-old was the president of his own corporation, and everyone had a sideline. I knew lawyers who were developers and doctors who were developers and dentists who were developers. I knew a legal secretary who was also a disco star (she danced in a pair of shoes illuminated by twinkling lights, until she melted them on a radiator) and a model who cut silhouettes at AstroWorld as her true career. Two of my closest friends were graduate students in architecture at Rice University: one spent his time drumming up commissions to build mansions on the edge of golf courses (the status site in those days); the other, who drove a Mercedes he’d bought from a used-car dealer near River Oaks, was forever trying to set up a meeting with Kenneth Schnitzer or Gerald Hines to persuade them to put tennis courts in the parking lots of Greenway Plaza or the Galleria. We used to drink at a jazz club called Cody’s, on top of a Montrose high rise. Sometimes we would look out over the terrace at the view of downtown, the Galleria, and the medical center and talk about leaving town (“If you don’t like Houston, move someplace nice” was our motto), and sometimes we would joke that all Houston lacked was a mountain with a ski slope at the intersection of the 610 loop and the Southwest Freeway. About a year or so later, someone built one.
You see, we were all making it up as we went along. We wanted to believe that there wasn’t a plan and there weren’t any rules—like wildcatters, we could strike it rich tomorrow, lose it all the next day, and start over the day after. I would talk to friends back east and tell them I would be packing up in three months or six months, but I had no intention of leaving. I wanted to see what would happen next. It strikes me now that the good times didn’t create Houston’s passion for self-invention, but simply exaggerated it. That characteristic is a fundamental part of the city’s nature, and we were just following a tradition established by eccentric but canny dreamers like the Allen brothers, who invented a city in a swamp, or Judge Roy Hofheinz, who thought a hulking, covered stadium seemed like a good idea. To a shy girl from a self-conscious, socially correct family, the notion that a person could simply invent herself seemed nothing short of miraculous.
And though I was living on fertile ground, it was also familiar territory: most of the people I was surrounded by held to a standard of propriety that seemed peculiarly Texan. Even when the population had soared to 2.5 million, Houston sometimes had a surprisingly small-town feel: you could still get a homemade egg salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper at the courthouse. Manners counted for something: a secretary I worked with once sneaked out of the office in the middle of the day to buy a friend a bottle of perfume because, she explained, her friend was broke and “no woman should ever be without a bottle of perfume.” I used to get regular phone calls from an old woman named Hazel Deets, because her sister’s phone number was one digit different from mine. Since she called so often, she started taking the opportunity to ask about my life, my job, and my boyfriend (“Does he live at your house all the time? Are you two married?”). I felt looked after. Houston might have been the fifth largest city in the country, but I had the sense that I was home and that no harm could come to me.
I wasn’t safe, of course. “Houston is a mean town,” a neighbor told me the day I moved into my apartment. She was standing with her hands on her hips while her housedress billowed crazily under a blinding sun, and I remember smiling, as if I had just heard good news. I thought it was fascinating that the Houston police were a threat to the general populace, that the papers were full of grisly stories of children mauled by their parents’ pit bullterriers or pet lions. Even when I was in real danger, it struck me as just another adventure. One morning I awoke to a brilliant sunrise—the sky was shot with wild streaks of orange, fuchsia, and lavender. I went back to sleep only to find that the sky looked the same way two and then four hours later. It turned out I hadn’t seen a sunrise at all but the fire and fumes from a pipeline explosion southeast of town. Another day I raised my shade to see a man fleeing down the street naked, as if he were on fire. One night I was up late and suddenly became aware that someone was at the window, inches from my head on the pillow. We stayed that way for some time, head to head, listening to each other’s breathing, until finally I reached over and switched off the light and heard his footsteps as he fled down the driveway.
The perils weren’t real to me, partly because I was young and partly because I had made no promises to Houston. I remember the day I realized that promises or no, I was a part of life there in a way I might not have envisioned, that I might not like. I had been working on a personal-injury suit in which the plaintiff was a triple amputee who had been crushed between two rail cars while trying to separate some air brakes. As often happened, there was fault on each side, and it was our attorney’s job to settle or simply to hold down the damages for the railroad. The plaintiff’s lawyer had his client undress in front of the jury, removing first his jacket, then his shirt, then his slacks, and then one by one, his artificial limbs, until what was left of him stood leaning in front of the jury in his boxer shorts. “What’d you think of that?” my boss asked me later, adding, “He looked like Flipper!” He laughed and I laughed, and I knew it was time to find something else to do.
If it’s generally true that making a living as a writer is hard—most big cities have more than enough writers to go around, and few editors have the time or the inclination to help someone starting out—it wasn’t so in Houston in 1979. Being a journalist then was no different from being anything else—there were more stories to tell than there were people to tell them. The magazine editors I met as a young reporter were like most of the young developers and young attorneys—long on enthusiasm, short on experience. I wrote for magazines that started and folded within weeks, for a magazine with a Saudi publisher, for a magazine next to a whorehouse, and for a magazine where my tryout required an analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. The world was suddenly open in a way that I would never have quite believed. Writing about the boom proved over and over to me that people could do as they pleased in Houston and get paid for it, myself included. I traveled through the Third Ward with consumer watchdog Marvin Zindler, noting where he sniffed out potholes and when a concerned fan brushed dandruff from his shoulders. I stayed at Tony’s until closing time, watching columnist Maxine Mesinger hold court and apartment czar Harold Farb order chicken-fried steak. I interviewed entrepreneurs who lived in empty mansions, who created employment agencies made up solely of Vietnamese workers. When I interviewed Oveta Hobby while she was publisher of the Houston Post, I complimented her on the elegance of her paneled office—in the paper’s austere, contemporary headquarters, the oak floors and paneling looked like something out of another age. They were: her office had been moved board by board from the old Post building downtown.
I didn’t feel a particular responsibility to my subjects (I once dismissed a local newspaper columnist by stating that if he weren’t living in Houston he would be just another witty cocktail party guest). I knew only that the people I was writing about were different from other people in other cities, that I wanted to write about every possible variation of what was then the Houston story. To be young was to be excruciatingly self-absorbed: I interviewed Percy Foreman at the old Maxim’s downtown, where lights from the mirrored balls danced on the ceiling, and where the trial lawyer had not only his own table but also his own phone. When I complained that a freelance writer’s life lacked security, he reached into his vast pants pockets and pulled out several velvet jewelry boxes. He laid them on the table like a tarot card reader, opened them up so that the rings, brooches, and necklaces he had taken as collateral winked and sparkled in my direction, and then said something like, “Honey, this is security.” He saw my jaw drop, grinned, and took another call.
I did not decide to stay in Houston so much as I gave up the idea of leaving. My standard line was that I went to Houston to be a witness, that I would stay just long enough to land a better job elsewhere. But clearly by 1982, after three years of supporting myself as a writer, I could have left. I made frequent trips back east in those days, as if I couldn’t quite believe I could give up on the place. I was in love with a man in medical school in New York, and so I spent months at a time living in Brooklyn Heights. I went through the motions—made friends, wrote stories for national magazines, memorized the subway lines—but on nights when he was at the hospital I would walk out on the promenade and stare across the river at the lights of Manhattan, trying to conjure up a reason to stay. By then the old dreams didn’t apply, and I just wanted to go home to Houston, where I belonged.
My Library
