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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What did not occur to me was that things could go sour, in Houston and in my own life. Outsiders like to say—with a tone that suggests they would have seen the end coming—that Houstonians thought the boom would last forever. But by 1983 the slowdown was apparent. The price of oil began to slip, and people began to complain about the weather and the traffic, and the next thing you’d hear was that they had moved on to San Antonio or Los Angeles. Success wasn’t a sure thing; suddenly there were bad deals and big divorces: a couple built a casino near the Galleria in which patrons never received cash for their winnings (it burned down mysteriously), and the Farb marriage collapsed (wife Carolyn got a $20 million settlement). During that time I had begun to feel becalmed. What I had built came apart: a five-year love affair ended, and at the same time I was receiving Christmas cards with photos of new husbands, wives, or children. I left the magazine where I had been an editor for three years when the management decided that it wanted a publication that was less irreverent and more respectful of Houston’s wealthy. I realized fairly abruptly that just as I had made no promises to Houston, it had made none to me.
During my last week at the magazine, I got a call from a woman who asked if I wanted to write about her divorce—Marvin Mitchelson was her attorney, she said. I hedged, and she invited me to her house. Out of habit I got in my car and drove to the edge of southwest Houston, where all the houses were new, expensive, and looked like ski lodges. The woman was younger than I, maybe 26, small and pretty but skinny and hard, like the girls who made trouble in high school. She took me through the house, showing me the pool and the living room’s cathedral ceiling and a framed write-up from the Chronicle’s homes section. After the tour she handed me what looked like a steel brick. “Take it,” she said. “It’s light.” This was her story: She and her husband had been very poor, until he got the idea to start a recycling business, compacting discarded aluminum into bricks. In the early days they had rummaged in dumpsters and scoured parking lots for the stuff, but eventually the business caught on, and the money started coming in, enough for the house, cars, and vacations in Vegas and Acapulco. “It’s called the high life?” she said, as if she were explaining her story to a dense child. “The fast lane?” Then she told me, things got nasty, even though, she explained with a triumphant smile, her husband still wanted her to get pregnant. A lawyer at Mitchelson’s office thought she had a case, she said. “Wasn’t that a good story?” she asked. “Would People magazine be interested?” The woman’s mother came in then, wearing blue jeans and a windbreaker, her face weathered from too much sun and cigarettes and not enough happy times. She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, and the girl flinched. I told her I would get back with her. I took what I thought was a shortcut home and got stuck on the freeway for hours in the heat and knew that a story that would have thrilled me once was really just a sad, seamy tale. I didn’t want to write it, and I couldn’t think of anyone who would want to read it.
It was a year or so later before I realized that like a lot of people in Houston, I had built a career more carefully than I built a personal life, an oversight easily ignored in good times. One day I had been sent by a magazine to write about a River Oaks house that had been done over completely in pink. The editors had told me that the owner, a very blond socialite, was skittish, that under no circumstances was I to speak to her directly—I was to deal only with her architect and decorator. They walked me through the house indulgently, pointing out the French provincial antiques, the Henry Moore sculptures, and the antique rugs (“It didn’t fit in the front hall, so she just cut it”), proudly noting that every room was a slightly different shade of pink. It was a hot day, and there was a Siamese kitten yowling on the patio and a parrot screeching somewhere near the kitchen. The owner wafted by in cowboy boots, jeans, and diamonds, nodded like a dignitary, and passed on, and it made me mad. I thought that she should let the kitten in, I thought that it was muggy and that I should have enough money to move out of my shabby apartment. It struck me that the Houston I had come to see had slipped away, that I was broke, and that I had better do something about it because I was looking at a future writing about rich women and large houses. When I was offered a job in Austin, it was remarkably easy to say yes.
One day two large, sunny movers named Leo and Carl arrived at my apartment and packed up eight years in about three hours. I kept expecting the morning to be rich with meaning, but instead I went to lunch with a friend, chatted with a neighbor in the eager, abstracted way of people facing monumental change, swept out the apartment, and answered one last phone call. I drove out of town down the Southwest Freeway, out the loop to the Katy Freeway, the reverse of the way I had come in from San Antonio eight years before, when the directions—take I-10 to 610 West to 59 North—had seemed so strangely promising and so impossibly complex.
“People live here,” is the way an acquaintance once described New York to me. It was her way of explaining that New York wasn’t really Xanadu, that I could move there, find a job and an apartment, even a husband, just like millions of other people. I never quite believed her about New York, and I don’t think I really believed it about Houston either. That wasn’t what I was after.
Sometimes I feel guilty about leaving Houston, like someone who ran out on a lover just as he hit a hard patch. There’s an element of penance to the rituals I perform when I return. I usually arrive happily and spend the day inspecting old haunts until I am seized by a powerful desire to go back to my apartment. When I realize that I can’t, I drive around until I am tired and grouchy and it is time to catch the last plane back to Austin. Much of what I knew is gone: most of my friends, many of the businesses—the law firm has suffered numerous defections, and the magazine I worked longest for is, at this writing, for sale. Even the Esperson Building was facing foreclosure for a time. Sometimes when I look back I find myself wondering if the place was ever really mine, if it was just my own youth that I was feeling, that any place would have done. Then again, if the boom was ultimately a short period in the life of Houston—it really lasted only six years at most—my stay there spanned what was then my entire adult life. I was in the right place at the right time, and I invented a life for myself there, the one I wanted at the time. I left Houston to create a different kind of life—I have become a cautious believer in marriage and mortgages—but the city taught me nothing less than that it was mine to shape, regardless of time or place. That is what people who have never lived in Houston—who see only that the place is unrelentingly flat, unceasingly humid, subject to assault by cockroaches, mosquitoes, and hurricanes—can never understand, and that is why Houstonians love the place with such passionate and unwavering gratitude.
The last time I was in Houston, I went to the Shamrock Hotel liquidation sale. I felt disconsolate when I saw the huge orange banner announcing the sale fluttering from the upper windows, and I wandered through the lobby, working myself into an exquisite depression by telling myself that soon there would be nothing left of the Houston I had known. I rode the elevator to the top floor and explored the cavernous suites with a cheerful, chubby woman and her teenage son. Aside from the view, there wasn’t much to see. The rooms were empty save for a few tacky chandeliers, the carpet was soiled, and the wallpaper was peeling. I asked the woman where she was from, and she told me Houston. “It’s sad,” I said to her, assuming that I had found someone with a capacity for nostalgia equal to mine. She shrugged her shoulders and pressed the elevator button. “It’s not that old,” she said, looking around. “The hotel’s really only lasted thirty to thirty-five years, and it’s really gone downhill.” The woman had a point. The Shamrock’s glorious past was long gone. Even the plastic shoehorns that the liquidators were giving away carried only the Hilton logo. Cafe society had been replaced by conventioneers long ago; all that was left to mourn were the Air France pilots who used to sun themselves in tiny bathing suits by the pool. So maybe it was time to let go of the past and start again. After all, Houston had always been about looking forward rather than looking back, and the time had certainly come to take stock and grow a little.
And I didn’t think everything I loved about Houston is gone. Leaving the hotel, I remembered a story I had heard a few days before about a florist named Leonard Tharp, who had bought a condominium in an old eight-story apartment building downtown. He wanted to put pots of wisteria on the roof and let the vines grow until they covered the building and touched the ground. Then he planned to swag them, so the building could emerge from behind a curtain of tangled flowers. It sounded like a good idea to me, and I was sorry I wouldn’t be there to see it.
But my memories serve me well. Whenever I hit town, three things about Houston come back to me. I remember that it always feels like rain, that the afternoon freeway traffic generally starts around three-forty-five, and that I once knew that anything was possible.
My Library
