Pug
I hadn’t really thought much about race until he asked me a simple question: “Damn, college boy, are you gonna be white your whole life?”
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At first we’d sneak away from work in the afternoons to a little strip of bars on East Twelfth: the Shalimar, the Yellow-Jacket, and the Oak Tree Lounge. There was a palpable thrill in parking that highly conspicuous House Suburban in front of a bar and going in for a beer, knowing that everybody in the neighborhood knew Maurice and there was no chance any one of them would call a complaint in to the Capitol.
We began meeting over there at night and on the weekends. Typically he’d be a little late, so I’d walk in and ask if anyone had seen him. They all knew him as Pug, a nickname he said he’d gotten when he was a kid and getting into a lot of fights. So when they told me, “No, there’s no Maurice Scotts that come in here,” I’d follow up with “What about Pug?”
“Nope. No Pugs either.”
“Scotty?”
“Nope.”
“Mo-Man?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just wait then,” and sure enough, within ten minutes Maurice would come in and the whole place would erupt, “Pug!” Then the bartender would tell me, “Sorry about that. We thought you might be the law.”
Some Saturday afternoons we ran a circuit between three dark, windowless bars—the East Side Lounge, Chester’s, and the H&H—playing the jukebox, watching ball games, and always ordering the same thing: Miller Lite in cans, with a tub of ice, a spoon, and some plastic cups to set up the bottle of whiskey Maurice had brought in. It would take no time for everybody to start carrying on or, as Maurice put it, to get fired up. They’d met like this a thousand times, everybody laughing and giving each other hell, hollering at one other, the bartender, the bartender’s kids, the television. If baseball was on, Maurice rooted for the Dodgers, and he said it was because of Jackie Robinson. And if it was football season, he rooted for whoever was playing against UT, and he said that that was due to Darrell Royal. Scout, an older whiskey drinker at the table, explained that Maurice and his older brother had been stud football players for Austin’s all-black Anderson High School. Both were easily good enough to play big-time college ball, he said, but UT, which didn’t suit up a black player until 1970, 18 years after Maurice graduated, was not an option.
Maurice bought the old Oak Tree bar about the time I got out of college. By then, all the clubs on the strip but the East Side Lounge had shut down, and junkies had more or less taken over the block. But Maurice intended to reclaim the strip and planned to reopen the Oak Tree once he retired from the State. One Saturday afternoon I took another white guy from the Capitol to lend a hand with the restoration. We’d been at it about an hour, sweeping leaves off the roof and moving furniture inside, when Chili and Money Brown came by with some wine Chili had made in his bathtub. For our purposes, the whistle had blown. I bought a case of beer at the Quickie Pickie across the street, and by the time I got back, the party was rolling in the Oak Tree front yard. We sat there drinking and telling stories the rest of the day, shouting at the people driving by who’d slowed down to shout at Maurice.
During a lull in traffic, Maurice looked at me. “Sponnie, did I ever tell you and your friend there about the legend of the Alamo?” I’d heard his take on Texas history before, but my buddy had not.
“I guess it was back one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred years ago, when Texas was fighting for their independence. It was down IH-35 to San Antonio, where the Texans were holed up in this church house called the Alamo. Outside there was, I’d say, two or three hundred thousand Mexicans, and inside there were eight white dudes. And them white dudes were bad, boy. Held those Mexicans at bay for maybe six or seven months or something. Just held ’em at bay. But then one day, Davy Crockett, who was the baddest one of all, he decided he was tired of them other dudes, and he needed to get him some lovin’. So one night he snuck out of the Alamo, and he forgot to lock the door. And that’s when those Mexicans went in there and killed every one of them white dudes.”
That was Money Brown’s cue. He was in his late eighties and had been a regular at all of Maurice’s clubs. The two of them had been going back and forth like this for fifty years. He said, “Maurice, why do you want to fill these nice young white men’s heads full of all that nonsense?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Money Brown?” said Maurice.
“You know David Crockett wasn’t at any Alamo.”
“Dammit, Money Brown, Davy Crockett was in charge of the Alamo.”
“No, he was not.”
“Then who the hell do you think was?”
“Daniel Boone.”
“Goddam, Money Brown, you antique motherf—r. You were at the Alamo! And you don’t remember running into Davy Crockett?”
Money Brown scratched his cheek, as though he were really thinking about it. “Nope, I guess I don’t.” He paused. “But I do keep a raccoon’s pecker in my wallet. You white fellas want to see it?”
Chili laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.
EVENTUALLY MAURICE just introduced me around the east side as his white son, and there was never a better time than when we got somebody to buy it. But as those things go, we ended up moving on. After graduation I left the sergeants and the next year started law school at UT. Everything was about studying then, but Maurice and I stayed as close as we could, getting together for birthdays and holidays, New Year’s Eve and Juneteenth, but no more Saturdays at the Oak Tree. Ultimately, we kept in touch over the phone.
Law school proved to be a whole other world from college, beginning with the first lecture, where there were more black students than I’d had in most of my undergrad courses combined. But the bigger surprise came when I’d occasionally hear a white student refer to those blacks as “niggers.” It would take only one request for them to find another term, but that wasn’t the same as changing anybody’s thinking. Some of the white students automatically assumed that the blacks didn’t deserve to be there and resented the fact that they were. I remember one white guy who gave me a thumbs-up during a final exam when a black student finished his test early. He was that confident that our grades would be better.
But the real shock came when the sorority girls started returning my phone calls. Most of third year I dated a cute little Pi Phi from Houston, but my improving résumé notwithstanding, I think she went into it in spite of herself. When we met, I was taking a constitutional law course that was essentially an exercise in black militant argument, and I was so firmly a member of what I called the White Apologentsia that a couple of times when I spoke in class, I think the professor was embarrassed for me. That phase ended when I left the laboratory of the classroom, but I was knee-deep in it when she and I went out. I mentioned something to her once about “redistributing wealth,” and she looked at me as though I’d just suggested she shave off her eyebrows.
One night she and I were having dinner at an Italian place with my dad when she asked him where I’d gone wrong. How does a nice Westlake boy’s heart come to bleed so? Remembering the way my dad had come undone when, as a ninth grader, I’d asked him how someone went about joining the John Birch Society, I waited for him to crow about prodigal sons, or maybe the proximity of trees and fallen apples.
“I think that happened when he worked at the Capitol,” my dad said. “He started spending a lot of time with a black man named Maurice, and I think he learned that there were people out there who didn’t have the same story to tell that he did. Just learning that one other story had a real effect on him.” I hadn’t realized I’d even talked to my dad about Maurice.
Some while thereafter, long after I’d been cut loose by the sorority girl and taken leave of the legal world, I was driving my dad to lunch. He said he wanted some barbecue, and he wanted it from a place he’d never been before. So I took him to Sam’s, on East Twelfth. We passed over the interstate and into East Austin. I pointed out the old bars to him, the Shalimar, the Yellow-Jacket, and the Oak Tree. By this time they had all been bought by a church, which turned one into a parsonage and the rest into halfway houses. As we parked at Sam’s and walked in, I told him that this was one of the places Maurice used to take me.
And there he was, the only customer in the place, Maurice, sitting with a rib plate at a table in the corner. I was thrilled. I took my dad over to meet him, and they shook hands, strangers who knew all about each other. After my dad and I got our plates from the counter, we went and sat with him. Straight away I noticed something was off. Neither of them talked. They didn’t even look at each other. They just stared at their ribs, lifted them to their mouths, and then set them back down. They never raised their heads or redirected their eyes. I glanced at my dad and saw a curious look on his face, as though he were trying to figure out if he was on someone else’s turf, or if someone was on his. Then I looked at Maurice and saw the same strange expression. As I thought about just what that turf might be, the room grew quieter still.
My Library
