Can Berney Seal Save Corpus Christi?
A Hard-hitting investigative look at my dad.
(Page 2 of 4)
Berney’s language is not always complimentary. Best of all, he loves to trash opponents, especially the “Aginners,” his term for the elderly, retired, fixed-income masses, “masters of innuendo and misinformation,” the highly vocal minority that Berney contends has long kept Corpus sleeping. Circulating petitions at shopping malls and restaurants, the Aginners work by referendum, and with the signatures of 5 percent of the city’s registered voters, they can force an issue to a ballot. Not surprisingly, the Aginners are against everything Berney Seal is for. Once, the passed tax caps and abatements as easily as passing a Geritol bottle. Now they must endure the TV wrath of Berney Seal.
“I’m like Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow, or a reverse Paul Revere—the redcoats have come and they’re among us,” he says bounding into his gold Suburban. The vehicle symbolizes his new austerity and his dogged fight for survival, compared with his flash-in-your face years of commanding the streets in a white Rolls Royce with BERNEY emblazoned on the license plates. When he cranks up his engine at six-thirty in the morning, his battle for Corpus Christi is already raging. “God almighty, Mark, we’re at war!” he shouts. “But remember this, my son: Everything in its time. Corpus will come back, and when it does, I’ll kill ‘em like I’ve never done before.”
At his usual table in T&C, Berney’s first audience of the day is waiting. Huddled around steaming mugs of coffee are several realtors, an insurance agent, a district judge, an oilman, the police chief, the café’s owner, a gaggle of giggling waitresses, and my two brothers, realtors Eddie Seal and B. J. Seal Jr. In the high rolling seventies, members of this breakfast club printed T-shirts with their own logo, the Rolex crown insignia rising in the steam of a coffee cup. Today, with most of their Rolexes gone, they mark time with endless talk about a single subject: Corpus Christi. The men open—“Great speech last night, Berney. Boy, did you trash ‘em!”—and Berney closes, flashing his famous grin. “Can y’all believe that the Aginners are griping about that poster?” he asks pointing to the city’s Spring Break poster, which features a couple in skimpy beachwear striking a belly-to-belly lambda pose. “The Aginners say they’re rubbing their genitals together. But what do they want instead? A poster of a seventy-five-year-old couple wearing leisure suits and getting crapped on by the sea gulls?”
Invigorated by the laughter, we leave T&C and drive a block and a half to Berney’s office at 601 Everhart Road. Entering his Hall of Horns, a two-story lobby filled with wildlife heads, he checks his office’s pulse. With only 1 salesman out of 23 present, the office is barely breathing. “Oooongaowa!”Berney bellows. “Where is everybody? Boy, I’m tired…and the goddam caribou’s crooked.” He glances at me, then at a ladder, and commands, “Mark, you’re the only one who can jump up there and fix it.” Atop the ladder, I see yet another credo, on a poster with a quote from Macbeth: “Send out more horses. Skirr the country ‘round. Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armor.” Berney asks, “What does it mean? It means we’re gonna attack! Real estate is a game of numbers. Whoever can capture the most houses to sell, wins. My trouble is, we have the general, but we don’t have the troops.”
His mission is to return Corpus to the glory years of 1970 to 1984, when Corpus Christi real estate really was show business. Spicy agents! Gung-ho clients! Hollywood cars! Fabulous commissions! He stares at a group picture of his 1976 sales force, a road gang of sixty hip young realtors wearing Berney Seal Company T-shirts. “That was the most successful sales team in Corpus Christi history!” he shouts. “But it wasn’t the team. It was the real estate climate. There were so many people coming to town with big money from the oil business that anybody could get a listing. If a gorilla could drive a Cadillac and hold a multiple listings book, he could sell a house. But when things got tight, everybody got scared. They went back to selling shoes. They went back to being teachers, nurses, insurance agents. They went back to doing nothing.”
I snicker, “And this is show business?”
“It is,” he says sternly, “If you treat it like show business, that’s what it becomes. Trying to get a listing is like an audition. If I win, my name goes up on the house. And believe this, my son, I can set their ass on fire! You get me inside that door, and I can make ‘em do most anything. I have a ninety-six percent kill ratio inside the door. When they hear me, they don’t remember anybody else lives. Why? Berneymania. People love the talk, the style, the flair. I got that rap! When I go get a listing, I keep asking for the order. Then I get real quiet. And the first one who breaks the silence is the loser. I’ll say, ‘Will you lemme sell it? Will you lemme sell it?’ Then, I stop talking. You know what happens? The go like this: ‘Ahhhhhhhh.’ Like air leaking out of an inner tube. And then they say, almost whispering, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’”
Ahhhhhhh! My brain is on fire. A few hours with Berney Seal is like years in analysis. He calls this process “breaking ‘em down.” It’s a period of emphatic preaching, followed by comedic interrogation, during which even total strangers tell Berney their innermost thoughts and emotions. Today I am among the broken, a victim of his voice. It’s like a whirlpool, exhausting me, then sucking me into his opinions. This is what he is doing to his city.
“What could we do in Corpus Christi that would cause us to dance in the streets of downtown?” Berney’s voice is booming in his Hunt and Taste Room, a den full of deer heads (from the hunt) and lounging sofas (for the taste). The image on the screen, however, is perhaps my father’s greatest achievement—Berney Seal on television, the showman as shaman. Taking a quick lunch break on this sunny noon, he is airing reruns of his Second Opinions—two-minute prime-time instructions on building a better Corpus Christi, each ending with his now-classic tag line, “And that’s the way it oughta be.”
Berney’s Second Opinion’s greatest hits include diatribes on Corpus Christi’s statewide record of DWI’s the arrest and jailing of the entire Robstown city council for trying to diver utility funds into the city coffers, Donald Trump’s movidas (“mistresses”), and, most frequently, local politics and his kamikaze war cry to rebuild Corpus’ sluggish economy. “We have a community with low self-esteem!” he tells me, watching himself on television. “They say, ‘why can’t we become Houston or Dallas or San Antonio?’ I say we can become whatever we want to be. L.A. Texas. “Someday,” he taunted old Corpus on the tube, “we’ll come back and see how you died.”
Demanding equal time, the Aginners appeared on Channel 6 on Third Opinion, borrowing from Shakespeare (“Berney, we think thou dost protest too much!”) and attacking his pro-growth philosophy. One Aginner ever showed of his cashmere coat and Rolex, snarling, “See Berney, I don’t always wear a leisure suit.”
This afternoon, Berney gives me the names of two top Aginners, encouraging me to judge them for myself. After the first Aginner declines an interview, I visit the residence of Phil Rosenstein, 66, a petition-circulating, newsletter-writing retired merchant marine. In his living room, Rosenstein watches a video tape of Berney’s Second Opinion reruns and tells me how my father is out to destroy his town. “You ask me what I’m for. Really the question should be what I’m against.”
What’s he against? The developer mentality of Berney Seal. Berney “slanders” the elderly interest groups, pronouncing the $50,000 tax exemption on residential real estate for the over-65 as a “greed tax,” Rosenstein says. Berney would “devastate” Ocean Drive with high-rise condominiums. Berney calls referendum a waste of time, “exactly what Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Manuel Noriega said,” Rosenstein declares. “Thank God there was no Berney’s Second Opinion when a group of Aginners signed the Declaration of Independence, or we might not be free today.”
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