Farewell to Cracker Eden
The Oak Cliff of my childhood had broad streets, narrow minds, and God-fearing people. Today it is a mockery of the place I knew.
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In the early fifties, the Texas was the principal seat of allowable public pleasure in Oak Cliff—a spit-and-polish place where Daddy took Mama to the show on Sundays. Already twenty years old by then, it was well kept up, not even close to being run-down. But as Jefferson withered, the once-venerable movie house started falling to pieces too. In 189, to avert demolition, the nonprofit Texas Theater Historical Society (TTHS) with aid from the Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce, bought the old landmark, pledging its restoration and development as a cultural arts center. To meet the $3.000 monthly mortgage, TTHS volunteers—many of them teenagers from the area—reopened the theater as a $2 rerun venue. (This past February the TTHS board filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.)
On a late weekday afternoon before the evening show, Maxine Burroughs, the matronly manager, showed me around. She was a veteran Texas employee, along with her husband, the doorman who had been on duty when Oswald was apprehended. “Butch and I got involved,” she explained, “because there’s no place left in Oak Cliff for families and kids to go.
The lobby looked frayed, sad, smaller than I remembered. We mounted the foyer stairs, passing a mawkish amateur mural of JFK, and climbed to the balcony. “Were you here when the stars still worked?” she asked, pointing to the mud-colored ceiling. “I’ve only seen pictures of it-little planets and clouds outlined in electric lights. The architects said everything’s still up there, just stuccoed over.”
I wandered along the center aisle, glancing by reflex toward the last rows in front of the protection booth where the riffraff of Oak Cliff’s hillbilly gene pool had traditionally gathered—the dreaded “balcony rats.” In a watery light, I found my old spot by the A stairwell. While I was still a green hand, but a tall one, I was stationed there to keep a lid on the general anarchy. After a couple of grueling break-in shifts, less terrified of the badasses than worried about failing, I bought an oversized flashlight that suggested a club. The bluff worked pretty well for a year, until a beered-up lummox from West Dallas flung himself at me over four rows of seats, and I did the first thing that Matthew or Spook would’ve done— bobbed him on the ear. The injured party ran bellowing to the lobby, alerting the manager, who had him hauled off for drunk. As a sort of reward for “cutting it,” I was transferred downstairs to the candy case, a choice job compared with standing aisle.
On a fall night in 1952, as I was closing up the candy case, Tess Tyler came out of the auditorium and stopped to shoot the breeze. I called her that because her own name was so student-nursey, and she had the brisk stride and ginger bangs to go with it. She was a neighbor, in her mid-twenties, divorced, familiar enough at my boardinghouse to sit down at meals. We had a casual, jokey acquaintance, and we decided to walk home together.
On the way, having our first private conversation, I saw her clearly as a person instead of a as a remote adult. She had married a well-off Oak Lawn jerk who bruised her around and then threw her away. Under the blowy elms on East Ninth, slowing down to light one of the Tareytons she chain-smoked when her relatives weren’t around, we bumped into each other accidentally and then embraced impulsively. We stood holding each other, kissing, both of us shaken. I was speechless. In the shadows, her face was pale and a little too lean—pure-dee Oak Cliff. “You wouldn’t tell anybody, would you?” she asked in a faint voice. “No, I swear.” “Wait for fifteen minutes. When you come up, be sure Mama’s lights are out.”
We met that way for five or six months, fugitives in the dark, risking everything not so much for sex as for deliverance from love-starved isolation—some shared connection to stave off loneliness. Our times together were tender, painful, glorious, wretched wise, and foolish—but redeemed, I thought, by the solace and comfort we gave each other. Tess taught me to tie a Windsor knot, comb my hair without a part.…Sometimes I went to her place to write while she slept with the radio low.
But we were tap dancing on the edge of disaster, and the dread of exposure bore in on us. We both knew that her holy roller mother would shoot us in the name of God if she ever figured things out. After a couple of close calls, we backed off, saw each other less, then not at all. For a while, we took pains to avoid meeting. Then we began exchanging guarded greetings in passing. In the end, we went back full circle to being casual strangers across the boarding-house table.
MRS. BURROUGHS BECKONED ME downstairs, into the main auditorium, with an expression between a frown and a smile. We stood regarding the infamous spot where Oswald was captured. “It’s the fifth seat in the third row,” she said. “People come from all over to see it, you know—police officers, school groups.”
I walked ahead down the main aisle, resisting a sudden urge to tell her I had seen enough and had to leave. As I descended deeper into the dingy gloom of the theater, another pocket of memory opened up, and I crossed to the side aisle and hurried to the fire exit. I parted the mangy curtains and peered inside at a chest-high door set low in a peeling wall.
“What in the world was this place used for?” Mrs. Burroughs asked. “Do you remember?”
“The usher’s dressing room,” I said. “It’s were we stowed our coats and ties, personal things.” The tiny wooden door, unopened for decades, was locked tight as a tomb. Turning away, I let the curtain drop. I realized I was shaking a little.
In my final semester at Adamson, a cheap zippered notebook crammed with my writings disappeared from the cramped little cubbyhole. My old manager, Jimmie Rawlins, thinking it was schoolwork, helped me search high and low, but it was gone without a trace. The contents included photos of Opal and Big Grover, stories, poems, and part of a novel I had started at Tess’s apartment. Sixty-odd pages long, called Midnight Show, it was set in the upper balcony at the Texas on a violence-wracked Saturday nigh. Writing it, I had felt fully in possession of myself for the first time—exalted by the idea of work that was a calling.
The loss of the manuscript seared my soul. In dry despair, I didn’t have the heart or the know-how to start it over. In dreams, I kept finding the pages and losing them again. I got drunk and bawled at the West Dallas Cemetery. I tried concentrating on Hemingway’s concept of grace under pressure, but that didn’t help either. For a long time, I felt unable to assign any meaning to works.
As graduation neared, Spook bought me a “dress-up” suit at the Penney’s on Jefferson. When I tried it on for him, we were already set on separate paths. He was about to retire, and he’s recently joined the church of his sisters’ dreams. I hid my true feelings about it, but a gulf opened between us that would widen over the years. At my June commencement, we shook hands and patted each other’s shoulders, and he said he’d pray for me.
By then, I’d left the Texas and found a slightly better-paying job at the Pig Stand drive-in on Colorado and Zangs, where one of my uncles was the boss. I was going fairly seriously with an Adamson belle whose guiding lights were sanctimony and matrimony. I longed to get away—to make tracks for freer climes—but how? Oak Cliff closed around me like a fog off the Trinity. Counting false starts and dead-ends, it would be ten years before I lit out for the real territory of my life.
BACK IN THE LOBBY, A CREW OF young volunteers was busily preparing to open the concession stand for the night’s show. Mrs. Burroughs walked me to the main door.
“It’s sort of hard to put into words,” she said, “but the Texas is still really a special place. To me, it represents entertainment, people having fun—not just Oswald and all that stuff. I hope you enjoyed the visit, hope it brought back pleasant memories for you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
Outside, the darkness was lowering on Jefferson, and except for the theater sign and the marquee advertising Naked Gun 1 1/2, the neighborhood looked abandoned. A DART bus rattled by with no one aboard but the driver. Halfway to my car, I felt a sudden stab of alarm, a prickle at the back of my neck…whirled around. Nobody there.
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