Today’s the 40th anniversary of the Charles Whitman shooting, so I thought I’d drag this out again.

“Austin Askew”–Chapter XXIX– 8/1/66: A Charles Whitman Gazetteer

Helen Frankenthaler, “Over the Circle,” (1961), The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Joan Mitchell–“Rock Bottom,” (1960-61), The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin.

James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)

 

This was displayed at the Blanton Museum of Art on the University of Texas at Austin campus from October 19, 2014 to January 4, 2015.

I first saw this during a guided tour, and I think I was the only person in the group who seemed to realize that it was the tennis ball and Kong toy of the artist’s deceased dog. When I saw it the image hit me with such force that I almost began sobbing convulsively.

“The Making of ‘Gone With The Wind.'”

Shown from September 9, 2014 to January 4, 2015 at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The “Curtain Dress.” P

Producer David O. Selznick’s office.

Alternatives for Rhett’s last line. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten notes.

TOM SACHS: BOOMBOX RETROSPECTIVE 1999–2015

Showing at The Contemporary Austin from January 24th through April 19th.

So, are my photos crappy enough to be labeled “normcore”?

“I Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down,” Parts VII, VIII, and IX–(Originally posted in 2007.)

–Part VII–

–Wednesday–11/7/07–This evening my dinner was cooking in the oven. I was sitting at my computer. The TV, radio, and stereo were turned off. Things were absolutely quiet, or so it seemed. I became aware of a sort of rattling. But there was no fan on. My leg wasn’t shaking under the table. My body was making no movements that should cause any object in the house to move.

I stopped typing. I listened closer. I began to perceive the sound of an animal enjoying his dinner, or more specifically, a dog eating a bowl full of dry dog food. But I knew that Fred and the kitty weren’t here anymore. Then I began to focus in on the sound.

It was coming from inside the heating/AC duct that opened out on my living room ceiling. It had to be a rat or mouse. I shone a flashlight up in the hole and the noise stopped. Then I left a message with the apartment maintenance crew. But no telling when I’ll hear that sound again, or when or if the maintenance guys will do anything about it. I just don’t want to see a rat fall out of the ceiling into my lap, or find one munching inside one of my kitchen cabinets.  But I suppose living right next to the woods it should be no surprise that there are wood rats here.

Now I love animals way, way more than I do people. Mankind has fucked things up so much that I would love to give Planet Earth back to the animals and zap the human race into a well-deserved oblivion. But I am thoroughly creeped out by rats. I used to find wood rats the size of house cats doing the polka along the ceiling beams of our store house in Conroe, but before I could go get a .22, the damn things would run away.

[NOTE: This was all before I went vegetarian. If I saw a rat now I’d probably just run the other way.]

In Kirkley Hall, my old dorm at Sam Houston State, during finals week in Fall 1985, Brent, a friend with paramilitary tendencies, trapped a rat in his closet. There was a great hullabaloo as several of us ran down the hall to see what was up. Doug, my friend and RA, insisted that there couldn’t be a rat in the dorm.  The rat jumped from there onto the desk, grabbed onto a cord for the Venetian blinds, swung over to the top of the refrigerator, jumped to the floor, ran through Doug’s legs, and scampered across the room, where Brent attacked the rat with a broomstick. But I took out a semester’s worth of rage and frustration on the poor creature, not only killing him, but breaking off bits of his skull and teeth into the tightly-woven carpet, and splitting my Louisville Slugger in the process.

Doug was eventually promoted to Hall Director, and in August 1989, after I’d spent part of the summer camped out in his spare room, I figured the least I could do for him, to repay him for his kindness before I left Huntsville for good, was help him move from Belvin-Buchanan Dorm into his spacious three-bedroom Hall Director’s apartment at White Hall. I stuck around a few days to help him unpack, and one night saw a huge rat running across his kitchen bar. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed like a woman. But Doug didn’t turn around fast enough, and didn’t believe I’d actually seen a rat, or at least, he found no evidence of a rat being in his kitchen.

A month passed. I moved to Conroe, then Austin. And I heard from Doug.

It seems a few nights after I’d left another rat made an appearance. Doug called the Maintenance Department and they sent a few guys over to investigate. They found some tell-tale holes.

Then somebody got a hunch.

Doug’s apartment was one floor above the old White Hall cafeteria, which had been closed for several years.

Doug and the maintenance men went downstairs, unlocked a door to the cafeteria, and found the floor “alive—swarming, swimming with thousands of rats. It was like waves of grey and black all over that floor,” as Doug put it. It seems when the University closed the cafeteria nobody bothered to get rid of the excess food that was in storage. Doug told me it was a massive operation for the exterminators to kill all those rats, and the whole place stank for weeks.

I forget what the final tally of rats was. I think somebody calculated how many years the cafeteria had been closed with how many litters rats can produce in that many years, and came up with an astounding figure.

And I said, “Well, you’d think by now you’d believe me when I say I’ve seen a rat.”

–Thursday–11/8/07–A busy day. On the way downtown on the bus a young woman told me all her problems—lack of housing and health care and so forth, and I gave her the names of four agencies she could go to to get those things.

At my second bus stop an off-duty bus driver came up and started talking about his love life, how that now he’s in his 50s he thinks he’s too old to bother with most womens’ bullshit. Then during the last third of the ride he held forth on religion and how important it was to get right with God. The conversation was actually more interesting than I’ve made it sound.

While I was on the second bus on my way to see my case worker in East Austin, some dumb yuppie bitch turned the wrong way on a one-way street, almost getting broadsided by the bus and two cars. Then to a chorus of car horns she makes an awkward U-Turn the right way, but only gets into the lane at a 90 degree angle. And then and only then did she condescend to put down her cell phone to concentrate on the fucking road.

My meeting with my case worker was to last from 11 to 11:30am, but it ran until 12:37, after which we rushed out to her car and she sped me over to my therapist’s appointment with just a few minutes to spare.

My case worker talked to me about a job-training program, but concluded it would probably be too simplistic for me. She gathered it was for people with no career skills whatsoever, who aspired to, at best, a position at Goodwill or in the custodial arts. We also discussed my getting on disability, yet again.

Before my meeting with my case worker really got started we discussed our tastes in music, and I gave the rather cliched answer that I like a little of everything. Then she said, “You know, a lot of times when I’m racing around town in the mornings I like to turn over to KUT and listen to a show called ‘Eklektikos,’ hosted by a guy named John Aielli. Are you familiar with it?”

Boy, am I. She had no idea how much I hate that prissy, pedantic jackass.

I have long had a love/hate relationship with KUT. Sometimes they play the coolest music I can imagine, and other times they annoy the bejesus out of me. A few years back they had a DJ who had absolutely no business being in broadcasting—he had a weak, quavering voice that made him sound constantly on the verge of a stroke. Just listening to him made me feel I was breaking into a palsy.

When I had that graveyard shift job, after I’d pretty much played all my CDs so often I was sick of them, I often had my radio turned to KUT. The late night jock sometimes played stuff I enjoyed, but then he’d get on kicks where he played shit that annoyed me, which included the likes of Lucinda Williams (who, as I’ve written before, has an annoying habit of repeating one line over and fucking over in her songs), Brett Dennen (who sounds like Droopy the Dog), and quite a few over-rated local Austin acts (that “crying-in-mah-whiskey-glass” shit gets real old real fast). One night we had serious rain storms and this guy played rain themed songs for at least 75% of the show—a very lazy DJ practice, or proof the DJ knows how to Google song titles—take your pick.

Now I loathe morning radio. Radio is generally shit between 6 to 9 or 10am. I cannot understand what sort of mind would actually enjoy listening to the inane babbling of DJs instead of music. (Sadly, when I was in Paris I discovered they have silly radio morning drive-time shows there too.)

But when I go off for my regular outings to the therapist, to group therapy, to see my case worker, or to attend to all the bureaucratic bullshit attached to my treatment, I always take my portable radio with me, and I enjoy flipping between the channels. Aielli is on from 9 to noon, and God help me, sometimes he plays stuff I enjoy.

But the high price I have to pay is enduring his annoying fucking mannerisms. He is always smacking his lips and popping his consonants into his mike. And he is the King of Dead Air. If you’re listening to Austin FM radio on a weekday morning and turn the dial down towards the far right and hear prolonged silence, you can bet it’s Aielli.

And I have never experienced anyone—yes, even myself included—who is so self-involved, so thoroughly impressed with himself, so single-mindedly set on entertaining himself and only himself. It’s masturbation over the airwaves.

He’ll babble for ten fucking minutes about the weather, then rattle on about his garden, and whatever sorts of caterpillars are making nests in the trees this season, before plugging his blog—which must be unbearable in its smugness—I’ve never attempted to read it. Then he’ll play a piece of Peruvian flute music, then smack his lips, go “Mmmm” a lot, then conclude that the piece reminds him of, say, Rosemary Clooney singing “Harbor Lights” or some fucking far-fetched thing like that, and will spend the next half-hour playing every version of “Harbor Lights” he can find in the KUT library.

He’s also one of these types—you know the kind I mean—who feigns an ignorance of certain aspects of pop culture, in an attempt to show off his supposed intellectual superiority: “What’s a ‘Paris Hilton’?… Is that a hotel?…Mmmm…Smack smack…Could that be a reference to Paris in Homer’s ‘Iliad’?…You know the 19th century American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens named his son Homer…Mmmm…Bill Murray named his eldest son Homer…Smack smack…If you ever saw the film ‘Broken Flowers,’ directed by Jim Jarmsuch…and if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend you rent it immediately…It’s sooo good…One of the best films of 2005, if you ask me…Mmmm…Well, if you did see the movie—I’m not giving away the ending here, but  remember at the end when Bill Murray is standing in the street and a car goes by and a young man looks at Murray?…Mmmm… Well, that’s Bill Murray’s actual son, Homer….Smack smack…Mmmm…Well, anyway, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the man who designed the old $20 gold pieces, the kind FDR removed from circulation during the Depression…Mmmm…The $20 gold piece was the one with the double eagle on it…There was a march called ‘Under the Double Eagle’ written by Josef Wagner…No relation to composer Richard Wagner, though…Mmmm…Smack smack…Saint-Gaudens was also a friend of the architect Stanford White, who designed the original Madison Square Garden, and was later murdered there…Mmmm…You may remember that Stanford White was played in the movie ‘Ragtime’ by Norman Mailer…Smack smack smack…So when I heard the other night that Norman Mailer died I put ‘Ragtime’ on my DVD player again, and I thought Mailer was actually quite good, though he really didn’t have that many lines, which was a shame…Mmmm…There was another movie about Stanford White…an old one…Oh yes, ‘The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,’ starring Farley Granger, a very young Joan Collins, long before she was on ‘Dynasty,’ and Ray Milland as Stanford White…Smack smack…I don’t remember much about it…I watched it on the late night movie back in the ’70s…But since Stanford White was such a big womanizer I thought it was fitting they cast Norman Mailer to play White in ‘Ragtime.’…Do any of you remember that TV movie they made of Norman Mailer’s book, ‘The Executioner’s Song,’ about Gary Gilmore?…Mmmm…Well, that starred a very young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore. That was long before anybody knew who Tommy Lee Jones was…Smack smack…Long before things like ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,’ which, by the way, was also a very good movie. Highly recommended….Mmmm…Oh, but before that he was also in ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’ and ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’…And did you know that when he was going to Harvard Tommy Lee Jones roomed with a young Al Gore?…Mmmm…Soooo Webster’s says the name ‘Norman’ comes from the Old German and means ‘northener’…Mmmm…So in tribute to the late Mr. Mailer and all the Normans out there—Norman Rockwell, Norman Lear, Norman Vincent Peale…let’s play a little Norman Greenbaum…’Spirit in the Sky.’”

Honest to fucking God, that is exactly the way that fucker goes on for three hours a day, fifteen hours a week! I just want to reach into the radio and throttle that fucking ponce!

But anyway, these people who pretend not to know of pop culture usually don’t watch TV, and feel that that renunciation makes them superior to others in some way, but to his credit, I think Aielli does at least watch some TV. But he still doesn’t know the difference between Nick Drake and Nick Cave, or for that matter, Jon Stewart and Dave Chappelle!

You can tell from his interviews with musicians that he doesn’t really keep current with things, and doesn’t feel it necessary to do any kind of pre-show prep if the interviewee doesn’t vitally interest him. If he’s interviewing a garage rock band he’ll ask the lead singer if he had classical voice training at some point, and while the singer is trying to sputter out an answer Aielli will go into a a long, drawn-out anecdote about his own experiences teaching voice. But most of the time he’s so caught up in his own little prissy, self-involved world he probably doesn’t even notice when he has guests in the studio. I can just imagine the daze he goes around in when he’s not at the station.

(And yes, yes—I will be the first to admit I am more than capable of indulging in pedantic self-absorption and wild tangents, but I think if I was in a position where I was supposed to entertain the public on a regular basis I would at least make an attempt to yank my head out of my asshole.)

But I have digressed, and digressed mightily.

As usual my therapist and I covered a lot of ground, and we also discussed these job-training programs (and after the appointment she called me with information on other programs, though after looking at the websites I’m not so sure they’d be helpful). She did say, however, that I really don’t need to be getting any more stressful jobs, as they are just making my symptoms worse. She suggested I supplement my contract work with something quiet and stress-free, possibly even something boring.

She also asked me to try walking 15 to 30 minutes a day, fast enough to get my heart going. I tried this out in my neighborhood after I got off the bus, by taking the long way home. The hills nearly killed me. I did, however, check by my apartment office and learned that traps had already been set for the rats. I was assured that the rats wouldn’t die in my heating/air conditioning vents and stink my apartment up.

I had a nasty telephone argument with James, wherein he held forth with his usual nonsense, and asked if my care-givers had agreed that everything he’d said about me was right. I screamed obscenities, told him he was being no help at all, and he hung up. And I went to bed about 9pm.

–Friday–11/9/07–I went back to my apartment complex gym for the first time since Fred got sick last year. I got on the treadmill and did some sit-ups. I left sweaty and with my ass thoroughly kicked.

Tonight we had some excitement in [my apartment complex]. A domestic disturbance beef. Three cop cars, then four. One drunk young woman, talking smack and screaming.

–Saturday–11/10/07–Monday–11/12/07–I spent these three days writing the first installment of my latest writing contract job.

–Tuesday–11/13/07–Today’s main project was going across town for a doctor’s appointment. Three hours on the bus all told. And when I got there the doctor had gone off to a meeting and hadn’t bothered to call me and cancel. I met with a nurse, but nothing really productive came of it. When I left the clinic I put on my headphones and the first song I heard on the radio was, appropriately enough, “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

And in keeping with the new tradition, I again heard Wagner on the way down, this time the sublime Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” The Liebestod, or “Love-Death Theme”–and once you’ve covered love and death, what else is left?–is considered by many to be the best and most accurate musical depiction of sexual ecstasy.

–Part VIII–

–Wednesday–11/14/07–I really wish I could disconnect my doorbell and put up a gate about ten feet in front of my front door so nobody could knock. Today I was awakened by a maintenance man, coming to fix my outdoor AC unit! Why did he have to drag me into it? And anyway, I thought they’d fixed it yesterday. The upside of this is that they’re finally considering replacing my old AC completely. I’ve always had problems with it, especially making annoying scraping metallic noises which are impossible to sleep through. But then again, I can’t think of any apartment I’ve had where the AC or heater worked correctly.

I think this maintenance man is Cuban, because he’s black but speaks with a pronounced Hispanic accent. What drives me up the wall about him is whenever he knocks or rings the bell, he doesn’t give me enough time to get to the door before he does it again, and he whines again and again in this childish voice, “Meeeeeeeen-teeeeeeeeen-neeeeence!!!”

[NOTE: I have since concluded he’s actually Haitian.]

–Thursday–11/15/07–I had to cancel my therapy session due to some explosive diarrhea I got from dollar store beef stew.

–Friday–11/16/07–I made arrangements with a friend of Matt’s who run an employment agency to go in and see her about something part-time. In the evening I watched “Les Mistons” and some documentary on Truffaut, then finished the evening with “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut,” which I’d not seen since it came out in 1999.

–Saturday–11/17/07–Another quiet day. I went to the grocery store with the last of my money and bought some survival food, totally botched a recipe James suggested for potatoes and onions (making it nauseating and no doubt ultimately diarrhea-inducing), and watched “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

–Sunday–11/18/07–I didn’t do much this day. I don’t even think I was awake for very long.

–Monday–11/19/07–I had to get up early, take a bus, then walk quite aways for an appointment. Matt has a friend who runs an employment agency, so I met with her today. She might have me something next week.

On the bus home I saw two real pieces of work. One was a kid wearing his pants sagging so low that not only was his entire boxer-clad ass hanging out of the top, but from the front it was clear his belt buckle was sagging way below penis level. Fucking idiot.

In the seat next to him was a guy with some weird tic—the entire ride, every few seconds he’d abruptly arch his shoulders up high and throw his head back. At first I thought he was just stretching, but after he did it repeatedly I wanted to break his fucking neck with a baseball bat.

Of course, part of the reason I was so irritable was I had over-done it with the warm clothes that morning and as a result was sweating, and every time I sweat or get over-heated I get very angry.

I puttered around the rest of the day, had a little more success with James’s potatoes and onions recipe, then zonked out in my room because I was so tired from my early start. When I got up I had some phone messages and IMs from James, asking if I wanted to go running around. I was sure he’d already done this, that the messages were several hours old, and so I was surprised when he contacted me again to see if I wanted to go. I said yes, then got all excited by the prospect of getting out of the house. Then our call got interrupted by his fucking call-waiting.

I waited and waited and waited, then finally IMed him to see what was up. He was still on the fucking phone. I asked if it was one of his long-winded friends, because he knows this one asshole who calls and yammers on for hours, and James just sits there saying “uh huh” over and over, never considering telling the guy he has other things to do.

The wait just stretched on and on. I was getting very angry, and IMing James to tell this fucker to stop blabbing and say good-bye. James wouldn’t say who was on the phone; I assumed this was because he knows I despise several of his friends.

Finally I called James’s number and just let the phone ring for about five minutes, knowing that my call would trigger the call-waiting and interrupt the conversation. James finally picked up, and said his call had just ended, and now he had to work on something. I asked if he was ready to go, but he insisted he had something to work on. I was screaming by this point.

Then James explained that the long call was from a guy he was working for on a contract assignment. Then the fucker called again and interrupted us and James let me go. When James finally called back I said that had he just explained that it was a work-related call and not just one of his asshole friends blabbing and sitting around smelling his own farts, I would’ve let James alone and waited for him to call me whenever the call was over.

I asked why he didn’t just tell it was a work call, and he said it was none of my business and he was protecting his “privacy.” He came by a little later and my heart was beating fast because I was so fucking mad. I had even taken one of my useless anxiety pills to try and calm down. I said, “Why the fuck are you obsessed with this notion of your privacy? You sit around playing computer games all day and at night either go to lodge meetings or watch movies? Where’s the privacy in that? If you’d just been straight with me I wouldn’t have gotten so angry and been such a pest.”

But I’ve concluded that James derives some perverse pleasure from watching me blow my stack, that merely making me angry is, for some reason, its own reward.

As we were driving around tonight he opined that I needed to learn how to edit again—this coming only a few weeks after he declared, “You’re a good writer, but a superb editor.” What he was carrying on about were my blogs and their length. I said that since no one really reads my blogs anyway I figure I can babble on as much as I wish. I said I needed a forum to express my thoughts and feelings. James admits he doesn’t really read my blogs so much as skim them for perceived libels and violations of his so-called privacy. The blog I’m working on here is at this point already over 14,000 words long and only covers a month of my life; though I’m cutting it up into five pages [typed], I seriously doubt anyone will take the trouble to read them all the way through. So if I have no audience, what’s the point it cutting my work short and holding back on all I want to say?

–Part IX–

–Tuesday–11/20/07–Wednesday–11/21/07–Busy  working on a contract writing job.

–Thursday–11/22/07–Thanksgiving. Am I thankful for anything? Hmm. 1) That I’m not homeless and haven’t lost my beloved possessions; 2) that I no longer work for that fucking store or that fucking OCR scanning place; and 3) that I have contract work coming in. That’s about it. Everything else about this year has been a complete, pointless waste.

This evening I went over to James’s for Thanksgiving dinner and watched “Amadeus” and “Conan the Barbarian.”

On the drive over there James got a call. During it he made noises of shock and sadness and I knew immediately what that meant. Tree and Eric, the friends that had taken in and fallen in love with my kitty, came home last night to find her dead behind a couch, her tongue and face burned. She had bitten into a power cord and been electrocuted. I hope she died instantly. It’s too much to expect she died painlessly.

This news cast a pall over the day. I felt as if all effort was useless—I had tried so hard to save that kitty—from probable death by a busy intersection, from probable death at a kill shelter. I’d found her a good home and she still managed to die horribly.

–Friday–11/23/07–Friday–11/30/07–I stayed busy working on my latest contract assignment. It was for 20 articles, initially due on the 3rd, but on Monday that got moved up to the 30th.

–Tuesday–11/27/07–This evening I put some vegetable oil in a pan, turned on the heat, put on the splatter guard, and went back to my computer. I was planning to fry some potatoes. But after a while I heard a loud “WHOOOOSSSSHHHH,” and realized the oil had caught fire.

I freaked out.

I’ve had a morbid fear of fire for years, which was only strengthened and affirmed after my apartment complex burned in 2004. And here it was again. I was so scared I was about to lose everything important to me.

I had a fire extinguisher, but I was afraid to use it with the pan on the stove, afraid it might blow the fire over to the stuff on the cabinet. It never occurred to me to look for the pan’s lid.

I unlocked my front door. Thanks to the poor design of my apartment, it’s impossible to get out of the kitchen when the front door is open. So I grabbed the flaming pan, rushed it down the entry hall, making grey stains on the walls, ran a few feet into the living room—the flames coming dangerously close to some books and DVDs on a shelf–threw open the door, and chunked the pan and burned splatter guard down onto the concrete stoop. My smoke alarm was beeping loudly and my exhaust fan was working over-time. One of my neighbors came out to see what the fuss was.

I ran back into the kitchen and got out he fire extinguished, but had a hell of a time getting the plastic tie off the safety ring. But when I finally got the thing undone, it just took one spray and the fire was out.

For several hours thereafter I was highly agitated and shaking. I called my mom to ask about how I should treat the burns on my left hand. (This reminded me of the time, a decade ago, I seriously cut my hand with a kitchen knife and called her for first aid advice while blood was gushing everywhere and I felt I was in danger of blacking out. The guests she was entertaining at the time were baffled that I had called.)

I was also worried about typing. I had a lot of work to do, and I couldn’t afford to be side-lined by an injury. Fortunately my left hand was good enough after a couple of hours that I could get back to work.

–Wednesday–11/28/07–Today I met with a doctor for my three-month follow-up on my crazy pills. He suggested I keep the Vistaril on hand if I ever needed a sleeping pill, but to switch to Fluvoxadine for anxiety. He also gave me a prescription for my thyroid medication, which I had run out of.

My case worker had to accompany me downstairs to attend to more bureaucratic matters with the pharmacy. As the elevators doors closed her eyes grew wide and she clutched my elbow:

–This is the first time I’ve been in an elevator since I got stuck in one over the Thanksgiving holidays.

–Yikes.

–Have you ever been stuck in an elevator?

–Not that I recall….But I did get stuck in a toilet stall in the Louvre once.

–Oh, well that’s a much better story.

(My case worker says she enjoys hearing me expound on the events in my past and present because I “organize them into neat little chapters.”)

–Thursday–11/29/07–Today my therapist said that contrary to my observations I have indeed been making great strides in therapy, and she’s pleased by my willingness to take an active part in the process and try out her suggestions, even when they involved doing things outside my comfort zone.

–Friday–11/30/07–I finished my contract assignment and watched “Léolo.”

–Saturday–12/1/07–Why the hell have I started getting all this spam offering me watches? Viagra and penis-enlargement ads I’m used to, but why watches all of a sudden? I seldom see people wear watches anymore, since most people seem to tell time with their cell phones. This is a damned shame, because my watch is in need of repair and I’m always obsessed with he time.

–Sunday–12/2/07–Worked.

–Monday–12/3/07–I started a new assignment and finished 75% today. I also got an e-mail from my friend and former manager Jeremy, telling me he’d be in town tomorrow and wanted to take me to lunch. That was a pleasant surprise.

–Tuesday–12/4/07–Jeremy was in town, so we went to lunch with former co-workers and had quite a jolly time of it.

–Wednesday–12/5/07–I got distracted by an on-line art site and stayed up for hours and hours looking at it, getting no work done. I did, however, buy some much-needed groceries before going to bed.

–Thursday–12/6/07–I reported to my therapist how, apart from my quarrels with James, things are going extremely well, that my freelance/contract work seems to be falling into place, and that I should soon be back on my feet financially if things keep going the way they are now. She was almost beside herself with happiness for me. She was surprised things came together so quickly.

Of course, if the contract job was to dry up everything could revert to shit again just as quickly.

After I got home I stayed up late finishing my assignments.

–Friday–12/7/07–I had to post all my articles and prepare an invoice. Because the articles had so many parts to post, the whole process took at least six hours.

–Saturday–12/8/07–I always like this time of year because 1) the temperature finally suits me (I hate how hot and sunny it is most of the time in Texas), and 2) I get photographic Christmas cards from Basset Hound aficionados from all over the world, people I’ve met on-line. These cards allow me to see the dogs my Basset friends write about all year. I probably get more cards from Basset people in one year than I have from all the non-Basset folks throughout my entire lifetime.

James and I got into another IM quarrel. He was suggesting I do a certain something to tell how many hits I was getting on a site, but he was being vague and talking in that techno-speak he’s so fond of and which he knows I don’t understand. I kept asking him to translate what he was saying into plain, direct English and stop being so deliberately vague, because I was tired of having to type every little question out. Then I repeatedly asked him to call me and explain it and he refused.

I then tried to muddle along and attempt to do what he was suggesting—not that I understood it. I asked if I was to do XYZ, and instead of saying yes or no he said I was framing the question incorrectly. I continued to ask him to translate or call me and he continued to refuse.

Finally I called him and like a stubborn child he let the phone ring and ring, despite the fact his wife and two guests were asleep in the next room. Then he wrote me this high-handed IM: “I am not going to talk to you for the duration of one week….Since you cannot behave within set boundaries I will enforce a greater one.”

Needless to say I flew into a rage that he was being childish, unnecessarily vague, difficult, and condescending, as well as using psycho-babble with me.

–Sunday–12/9/07–Sunday–12/23/07–Despite all the crap that’s gone in recent months and years, especially the crap that I’ve posted in this multi-part piece, things are going superbly right now. The change came at the beginning of this month. I’m actually happy for the first time in years. I am keeping very busy doing writing work that pays better than anything I’ve ever done. And the work is expected to last at least through the end of 2008. And I’m finally making plans for the future.

In our meetings the last few weeks my therapist has been offering some pretty amazing insights on a dream I had. My meds are pretty disappointing; the side effects  include serious dry-mouth that chokes me in my sleep. I don’t know whether the meds are contributing to my good mood or not.

So I guess this is as good a place as any to wrap up this particular long piece.

As to the title of this blog, it comes from an old Negro spiritual. James, my whiny guardian of all things Politically Correct, says that “Negro spiritual” is not the preferred term anymore. (Would he prefer “Person of Color spiritual”? It does seem the PC crowd likes to coin the most unwieldy possible expressions.)

As an aside I should mention that I am vehemently opposed to political correctness. PC seems built on the premise that not offending others is the most important thing we can do, whereas I believe most people deserve a swift kick in the ass and to hell with their supposed “dignity.” It’s high time people stopped taking themselves so fucking seriously.

PC is a huge waste of time, drawing our attention and efforts away from more important political and cultural work. It is politics as window-dressing, which, unfortunately, thanks to most of the politicians of the last few decades—presidents especially— has become the order of the day. (Remember “Mission Accomplished”? I’m sure you do.)

I hate anything that bastardizes and destroys the beauty of my native tongue. James and I have had huge battles over this. Since he has difficulty writing and spelling and using correct grammar, he naturally advocates anything new and trendy, anything that exalts ignorance and vulgarity of expression. (And don’t get me fucking started on camel case.) He suggests if I have such a problem with English changing, or, as he prefers to see it, “evolving,” then I should speak a prescriptive language that really doesn’t change, like French. “Well, maybe I will,” I said.

And let’s not forget how plain silly PC is. In PC a handicapped person is called “differently-abled,” which seems to imply someone who can do something other people can’t do, like for instance, perform auto-fellatio, not someone who can’t do even the basics that most people can do, like, say, walk. I’m not insulting the handicapped here, but again, I think we’re taking everybody way too seriously and going way overboard with handling everyone with kid gloves.  

Anyway, I got the lyrics from negrospirituals.com, so take the issue up with them, not me:

Wish I’s in heaven settin’ down, settin’ down
Wish I’s in heaven settin’ down
O, Mary
O, Martha,
Wish I’s in heaven settin’ down

Wouldn’t get tired no mo’, tired no mo’
Wouldn’t get tired no mo’
O Mary
O Martha
Wouldn’t get tired no mo’

Wouldn’t have nothing to do, nothing to do
Wouldn’t have nothing to do
O Mary
O Martha
Wouldn’t have nothing to do

Try on my long white robe, my long white robe
Try on my long white robe
O Mary
O Martha
Try on my long white robe

Sit at my Jesus’ feet, Jesus’ feet
Sit at my Jesus’ feet
O Mary
O Martha
Sit at my Jesus’ feet

I think I’ve seen it all now.

Tonight a man, maybe sixty years of age, boarded the bus and sat in the back near me. He had a droopy moustache, tattoos all over his arms and shoulders, was wearing sunglasses, a wife-beater T-shirt, and khakis, and was carrying a cane, a backpack, and a plastic bag full of toilet paper and unshucked ears of corn.

He fumbled around in his backpack and produced an empty plastic bottle, then began shifting his weight around uncomfortably. He then whipped it out and with difficulty began to fill the bottle with urine. In all the filthy, disgusting years I’ve been a passenger on Capital Metro, I think this is the first time anyone has violated the unwritten “no genitalia” rule–at least in my presence.

That the bus stopped and took on more passengers, one of whom came down the aisle and sat opposite him, did in no way affect what he was doing. I had the good manners to turn my attention to a stack of sketches I had with me until he finished his business.

Afterwards, the man replaced the top to the bottle, and stuck the bottle into his backpack. Thirty seconds later he fished out what I hope was a duplicate bottle, this one half-filled with a golden liquid that may have been–must have been–apple juice or sports drink, and took a long guzzle on the contents.

The shocking thing to me was not so much that people have started eliminating their bodily wastes on board the bus, but that I was so relatively unfazed by it happening. 

 

“Jessy Schwartz Explains It All.” (Written for a local magazine around 2001, but never published.)

“We decided to do a play – first we were gonna do a Frank Sinatra/Sammy Davis, Jr. type thing and have Frank Sinatra as Hitler, because we all watched the Rat Pack special and we were like, ‘Jeez, he’s like Hitler. He yells at everybody,’ but we changed our minds and wound up doing a show where we were playing Aryans who rewrote the story of Christmas. Three of us are Jews, so it’s kinda funny that we did that.

“But it was about two Nazis who got lost in the middle of nowhere and they see a light and so they bomb it. And it’s Santa’s workshop. So they’re freaking out because they realize who’s gonna bring all the toys to the good Aryan kids. And the toys are destroyed. At the same time my husband and I were Jews and we were in a concentration camp. I couldn’t talk because I’d had shock treatment, and he didn’t have arms. The Nazis make us make the toys. Then they shoot me. Mrs. Claus was on mushrooms, and they made my husband snort the cocaine that made the reindeer fly. They made him snort it so he could fly and give all the toys out. And that’s the story of Christmas.”

Actually that is the plot of the “National Socialist Cocktail Hour Christmas Pageant,” written by Andy Fisher and performed by the “Only Ninety Percent Effective” theater troupe, of which Jessica Schwartz was a part before it disbanded in 1999. The weirdness that most of us only experience in dreams after we’ve had chili for supper is commonplace in Jessy’s daily and artistic life. As an actress and comic, she surrounds herself with creative people who realize that the antidote to the suffocating political correctness that hangs foul in the air is laughter. And if that laughter is earned at the price of violating a few taboos, well, so much the
better.

Schwartz, who grew up in Round Rock, took to performing early, appearing on “Romper Room” and acting in school plays, but things really came together when she was in college. She and a friend attended an audition for extras for the John Travolta movie, “Michael.” During the wait they decided to play improv games and the friend was impressed enough to invite Schwartz to audition for her improv troupe, Only Ninety Percent Effective. Two days after that Schwartz was put in the show.

“We [Only Ninety Percent Effective] were very offensive. We tried to offend everyone we could. In ‘A Family For Ray-Ray,’ the premise was that we bought a baby on the Drag because we thought the troupe was gonna break up and we wanted to keep the troupe together. It was our very first sketch show.The baby was the thing that held the sketches together. And eventually we had to let him go. ‘Fly, Little Ray-Ray, Fly’— that was our last song. He was on a fishing line. Our stagehand had a cigarette in his hand. Audiences need to be ready for anything and if they’re not, then they walk out. And if they’re not and they realize that they are, then it’s good, because they’re like, ‘Oh, wow!’

“Andy Fisher and Leon Mandel do this thing called ‘Delirium,’ and they stay up 24 hours and they do an improv show and they get ideas to do a short. So they show the short before the show and then they do the show and get more ideas for the next one. They also do a show called ‘Poon.’I was in the last one, ‘Poon 3-D.’ My father will not be happy to know this, but I roller-skated without my top on, as a favor — I stress that — as a favor.They put me on roller-skates because they knew I did not feel comfortable trying to be sexy, because all the other girls were once strippers in their lifetime, and I’m not, so I get up there, and the whole time I’m just worried about staying up.

“The last play that I did was called ‘The Eight Reindeer Monologues’ [as Vixen the reindeer]. The reindeer had monologues about what happened. Vixen was raped by Santa. Vixen was a kind of serious, dark part, but there were comedic times.

“Donner is Rudolph’s dad. The reason why he and Rudolph were involved with the Christmas run was because Santa had a thing for Rudolph. And being part of The Eight is a big deal, and Rudolph is basically a deformed, retarded reindeer, so Donner wanted the best for his kid and so he let Santa do whatever he wanted.

“Prancer, otherwise known as ‘Hollywood,’ wrote a movie – ‘Prancer’ – they changed it completely. He was really pissed off about that. He wanted to get into the film industry. And he thought that the Rudolph movie was just awful, the Claymation sucked, all the reindeer looked like Donner because Donner is Rudolph’s dad. The whole play was really funny. I actually had to be very sexy, so I got over my whole sexy thing. It was a real change.”

Currently she’s working with feminist theater troupe Viva La Vulva on a murder mystery called “Sometimes Dead Truckers Are Naked.”

Jessy Schwartz has the tiny frame of a child, the riveting presence of a born monologist and the social skills of an old-time ward boss. Indeed, during a recent two-and-a-half hour conversation at Spider House, it seemed as if no more than ten minutes would pass before she’d be greeted by yet another of her friends and colleagues.

In 1997 Schwartz landed the role of stalker Becki Rae in MTV’s “Austin Stories.” “I called Laura [House] a bitch and a whore, sent her black roses and roll-papered her house and put ‘Satin 666’ instead of ‘Satan’ on her car. See, I thought my boyfriend was cheating on me with her.”

She has also appeared in independent films, including “Wrong Numbers,” which was an entry at the 2001 Austin Film Festival. In “Radio Free Steve,” which also made the festival circuit, she played Sheena, the main character’s girlfriend. “He kidnaps me and makes me go on this road trip and the whole time I’m bitching at him, miserable. We go from Austin to Los Angeles. We went to White Sands.I had a crossbow in my hand and the sheriff lady came out and she said that if I’d picked up the crossbow she would’ve shot me. It was really dangerous. We weren’t supposed to be filming there.”

In “Death For Sale” she played another stalker, a groupie obsessed with a rock star. In “Balloon Fish” she played Aunt Mida, whose nephew hangs out with a girl who has special powers. “It was the most obnoxious part. I was complete white trash, laying up on a roof, sun tanning in a tube top. It was just so nasty. And the whole time I was in character because the kids would not listen and I would yell at them.

“I did this thing called ‘I – Witness’ and it’s this murder-type thing on the Internet. You get to watch these episodes and I played this Russian prostitute, where there are three Russian prostitutes in Russia and one of us killed somebody, and you can watch and try and play along. It was done with a 360 camera. It can zoom in and move around so that you’re watching whatever one character is doing.”

Her most recent film role was as Kendra in “Insignificant Other.”

“It was originally a ‘Sex in the City’ spec script, but then the writer took it and changed it to a feature length.”

Currently she’s helping develop the film “Waiting for Superman.”

“Heather Kafka wrote it and she’s going to direct it. Really great script. We’re still looking for investors. We’ve got enough money to make the trailer, but we want Vincent Gallo and Tom Waits and Lukas Haas in it. The premise is there’s three friends and one of them tells the other two that he heard that Vincent Gallo is a superhero, so Vincent got sent this superhero costume and he puts it on and he can’t get it off. Vincent Gallo hasn’t committed yet.”

Schwartz has also done extensive voice-over work, most notably in Japanese Anime.

“Most of my voices are little girl voices, although as Canal in ‘Lost Universe’ I am a computer, I am a hologram, so I had a lot of voices. I did a chicken voice, a Glenda the Good Witch-type voice, an old lady, a French man. Apparently there’s a large fan base for my voice in Syracuse, New York, because every time I go [to the studio] they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve got e-mails from New York!’

“It’s hard work, because you have to get it in at the right time, you have to pause at the right time. Whoever writes it, it might be 26 flaps [movements of the animated character’s mouth] for one thing and they write it for like 17. And you’ve got nine extra flaps where you’ve got to figure out what to say, and so we rewrite. The Japanese don’t care, but people here wanna make it look good, so they’ll get good reviews so that people will buy them.

“I think I’m trying to do things that I’m not comfortable with so I can get over it. When I was doing improv I thought I could never do stand-up. I did stand-up, so I got over that.

“In my stand-up I do a character. Her name is Tassy Madison; she’s a six-year-old beauty pageant contestant. It’s really creepy. She’s from East Texas and her dad’s real into it and she talks about the good and bad things about being in beauty pageants. She does the talent competition – I do a tap dance to ‘Spinal Meningitis’ by Ween, which is just creepy to begin with. I haven’t done just straight up stand-up. It’s always much easier to be someone else when you’re up there because if you’re bombing you don’t care.”

So the big question has got to be, are either of the coasts beckoning to Jessy Schwartz?

“I keep on saying that I’m gonna move, but I don’t know where. I went to LA for a week and realized how awful it was. They want you to change. There’s so many people out there and they’re all beautiful, and I don’t know how well I’d fit in New York. Here I think my chances of getting cast in something are a lot better than if I moved because the casting directors know me or recognize me.

“I realize I fall into the character actress category, which is fine. I don’t really care about people knowing my name, I just want to be able to work and do good stuff and not be stuck in the same character. It’s tough to get out there. There’s so many good actors out there. I think a lot of it depends on being at the right place at the right time.”

Jessy squints her eyes closed, then opens them widely and slowly.

“I’m exhausted, because I just got out of an audition for a beer commercial. I had to country-western dance. My agent called me and said, ‘Can you country-western dance?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, of course,’ because that’s what you tell your agent.

“So I went to the Broken Spoke on Saturday to learn, and I guess this is my second day of dancing, and for some reason they considered me a strong dancer and people were throwing me in the air and catching me. It was a lot of fun, but I probably won’t get the part. I thought when you think of Texas and beer you don’t think of a tiny redhead. You think of blonde hair, big boobs…. So we’ll see. Maybe they’ll want variety, someone they can throw in the air.”

“Tales From a Great Indoorsman”–(Originally posted Friday, September 16, 2005.)

[NOTE: 5/7/12–I took a break from maintaining my hard-as-nails, cynical curmudgeon persona to read over this post I made about visiting the Austin Convention Center while it was being used as a shelter for evacuees of Hurricane Katrina. I had forgotten how intense the experience was, and reading the text and looking at the photos I took during that visit made me cry.]

My buddy Matt is Aide to the Mayor of Austin, and a few days after Katrina evacuees started arriving in Austin he called me and said, “You oughta come down here to the shelter at the Convention Center and meet some of these people. They’re great! Everybody’s got great New Orleans stories. There’s this old musician … You’d love talking to these people.”

I said I wanted to come down and begged him to get me in there, but I never got anything definite out of him. I knew they weren’t just letting private citizens in off the street–you needed security clearance or a badge or something. I knew I’d need Matt to escort me in.

I just had to get in there. I wasn’t so much concerned with hearing entertaining stories as I was feeling a profound need to help, and to get a more in-depth, realistic feel for what actually happened. I e-mailed Matt and left him phone messages for several days with no result.

Monday I had to go into town to do research for my column and buy a copy of an historical photo from the Austin History Center and then drop it off at my publisher’s office two blocks away….

I did my research, then headed over to the office….I paged Matt and told him I’d meet him at the new City Hall.

The Mayor’s Office has been turned into Katrina Central. I was ushered in just behind some charity group headed by a black guy who, though being a doctor and an adult, was at best only 4’10” tall. He also wore a sort of 1977-style black safari suit and looked more than a little like Sammy Davis, Jr.

My publisher had asked me to get some photos of the Mayor and evacuation shelter scenes for the paper. I had offered to write the feature on Katrina a week before, but he had put his brother-in-law on the job. My publisher had actually been at the Convention Center earlier in the day with his camera and saw Sandra Bullock volunteering.

He said, “Yeah, I saw her handing a bottle of water to a black woman and it would’ve been a perfect shot. I had my camera right there. I could’ve gotten that shot and sold it to ‘Entertainment Tonight’ or someplace and made thousands of dollars! But I was too polite. Then she gave me a dirty look and said something like, ‘No paparazzi! I’m doing the whole press thing next week.’ Whatever that means.”

As much as I love money I was shocked by what he said and made myself a promise that if I got a chance to take a good paparazzi-style picture of a celebrity at the shelter, and sold it for five figures, I would be bound to give all that money to relief organizations. It would be blood money, and I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.
Apparently Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey have put in a lot of appearances at the shelter, and not a few evacuees, doctors, nurses, volunteers, et. al., have been rendered star-struck.

So Matt and I drove to within a few blocks of the Convention Center, picked up the Mayor on a corner, then the Mayor and I got out on the east side of the building, went in, and I tried to take a picture of him for the paper. The Mayor posed by the entrance to the Job Bank, but for some reason my flash wouldn’t go off. It worked, however, when I pointed the camera at the crowd. I sensed the Mayor was getting impatient and I was very embarrassed.

[NOTE: This turned out to be because, as a novice photographer, I hadn’t yet learned never to take a picture of a subject with the like source behind him.]

The Mayor and I went back outside, and while he talked to a reporter I saw a school bus pull up full of evacuee kids just back from a day at their new elementary school. Photographers and camera-men rushed up by the bus and started getting shots of the kids, who in turn yelled, cheered, and flashed the peace sign. They were really eating up the “rock star” treatment. I’d not seen kids that happy in a long time.

We took the Mayor back to City Hall, then returned to the Convention Center, parking near the service entrance.
Some of you are not familiar with the Austin Convention Center. Some of you may not have been there since they added on to the building, at least doubling its size. It’s now a “C”-shaped structure, its longest portion running on a north-south axis, with lofty corridors skirting the outside edge, and a service court/loading dock on the inside of the “C,” facing east.

Matt explained that for all the large numbers of people still in the Convention Center, there had been 85% more last week. Austin was lucky, he said, in that we had 24 to 48 hours more to prepare for the evacuees than Houston did. He showed me where the processing tables had been set up last week. He said he’d helped build the shower facilities off the loading dock, put up an awning so pets in carriers wouldn’t be exposed to the sun, and claimed he’d lost track of how many cots he unfolded and assembled.

He showed me where the buses had pulled up, and said the first face each evacuee saw was that of the Mayor. The Mayor shook everyone’s hand and welcomed them to Austin. Now I am a huge cynic, especially when it comes to politicians, but Matt said the Mayor drives his staff to distraction with his refusal to promote himself, and I think, based on my encounters with the Mayor, that he wasn’t grand-standing or politicking by greeting the people like that, but was rather just being gracious.

I am also pleased that many people are referring to the evacuees as “new neighbors,” and not going out of their way to run these people off as soon as possible. Matt did mention, however, that if there’s another disaster in the near future the City may not have the money to help.

Matt took me up a large service ramp, past a geriatric ward and a triage center. Out in the main corridor there was a group of tables and shelves piled high with pharmaceuticals. We walked through a large exhibition hall and saw even more drugs, as well as doctors, nurses, a diabetes treatment center, people waiting to get examined. From there we went into yet another exhibition hall where, set up on the floor, there was an actual trailer, about the size of a construction site office, donated by the CVS drug store chain, and filled to the rafters with even more medicine.

It really began to dawn on me then just how wealthy a nation the US is, how many resources we have available, and it angered me all the more that if a medium-sized city like Austin could put together a logistical marvel like this in such a short notice, then why the hell had the Feds, FEMA, the National Guard, and the State, and local governments in New Orleans failed so badly to provide for the people there?

Back out into the corridor, Matt introduced me to a couple of clergymen, one a priest who’d been at the Convention Center pretty much since the evacuees arrived, the other a black preacher who’d been giving the City grief because black leaders weren’t brought into the relief planning sessions early enough to suit him. (You’d never have known there was any friction between the two, though.)

While Matt was trying to decide where to take me next, we encountered a little old black woman in a wheelchair, who had gotten lost and didn’t know how to get back to her cot. Now getting lost in that huge building isn’t hard to do, even if you’re young and healthy. There is one vast exhibition space in the building, but it can be divided up into any number of smaller halls by means of folding metal panels, two- or three-stories tall.

And as the population and needs of the shelter change, often day-by-day, the spaces are re-sized and re-configured. While I was there the powers that be were moving the men from one hall into another, so they could clean and disinfect the old one.

Matt took ahold of the handles of the old woman’s chair and we proceeded to look for her section, while continuing with the tour. I tried to take pictures of the dormitories, but a woman with an ID badge came up and asked what I was doing. (I had no official ID on me.) Matt explained he was with the Mayor’s office, and claimed the pictures were for his office, not for the newspapers. The woman apologized, and said she just wanted to make sure no one was being exploited, and we assured her that no, she was perfectly right in stopping us.

As it was, 1) I did not send in any photos that I thought might be construed as exploitative, 2) any pictures I sent in where I did not crop out the faces of evacuees were ones where the people were happy and not clearly suffering, and 3) Matt kept moving and I really didn’t have time to stop and do good, deliberate set-ups, so the dormitory shots were all blurry, and anyway, it was more important to get the old woman to her cot than for me to get pictures.

There seemed to be no end of rooms and storage areas. There was a functioning post office, whose lines were moving faster than they do at the post office in my neighborhood–and they didn’t leave three windows unmanned! There were banks of telephones, rows of computers, a section of baby strollers, boxes and boxes of diapers, and on the floor, a large pile of school book bags, which for some reason made me very sad.

These rooms smelled the way hospitals or nursing homes do. As we made our way Matt would ask different people, “Ma’am, are you doing okay?,” “Sir, can we do anything for you?” Some people just murmured that they were fine, others didn’t respond. (I think one of the women who didn’t respond had her ear phones on, listening to music.) But one older man with a grizzled beard just walked off shaking his head that no, things were not in fact okay.

I can sympathize with these people. If I was poor and black and had been through that hell in New Orleans and some smiling white politician came up and suddenly acted all interested in me I might be a little suspicious too.

There were people sitting or laying on some of the cots, staring into space. Some fingered small possessions like a toy or a CD. I made a quick appraisal of the grouping of cots that constituted a family’s “home:” a few clothes jammed into a plastic trash bag, a stuffed animal, a newspaper,  a Bible, a coffee cup, a tube of hand lotion. That was all these people had left in the world,  and more than likely they’d just been given those things in this shelter. That was when my eyes really began welling up and I started blinking hard. But I figured that if these people weren’t crying then I certainly hadn’t earned the right to do so, at least not there.

Another really strange thing was that the shelter, especially the sleeping rooms, felt oddly sacred, as if all the suffering these people had undergone made the place where they finally found sanctuary a hallowed one.

We finally found the old lady’s section and led her to her cot. She thanked us both and grasped our hands and we wished her well. Matt went over to talk to a bed-ridden guy he’d gotten to know and I took a picture of a cot with three stuffed animals on it.

Matt told me he’d thrown about six tantrums when dealing with businesses or other official-type people in regards to this relief effort. Now there are a lot of really overweight people from New Orleans. Matt is no slouch himself in the weight department, so he pretty much cleaned out his closets getting over-sized clothes for some of the male evacuees.

He then figured out how many more men needed big clothes and he called a big and tall men’s store he patronizes and asked for a donation. The manager said he couldn’t do anything about it, that Matt would have to talk to the regional manager. And then the regional manager balked too, giving some bullshit excuse for why they couldn’t donate the clothes.

Matt went nuts, and started screaming and cussing, saying, “I have been on the phone with just about every business in the city and they’ve all been more than happy to help out these people, and you mean to tell me you won’t?!!! If you don’t help, I fucking swear to Christ to make it my mission to fuck you over, and when all this is over and the Mayor gets on TV and reads off a list thanking every business that helped I’m gonna make sure he reads off your name and singles your store out as the only one in town too chicken-shit to help in an emergency!”

[NOTE: I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of Matt as I was when he told me that.]

As it was, the regional manager refused to play ball. Eventually the local manager donated the clothes after paying for them out of his own pocket. I cannot believe anybody would be so heartless at a time like this.
We cut through the dining room/snack bar, then went out on the loading dock. This was the smoking area, where the young and old men, particularly the old men in wheelchairs,  gathered. It also led down to the showers. Matt cautioned me the area was “kinda rough.”

We passed a display of letters and drawings from local school kids, expressing their sorrow to the children of New Orleans, welcoming them to Austin, and assuring them that things will get better.

A City Maintenance worker came up to Matt with a complaint, then Matt explained, “The first couple days you could tell everybody was so relieved to get here, they were like, ‘Thank you so much. We’re so happy to be here.’ But after a couple days people began to get comfortable and they started getting annoyed. They were like, ‘Where was the government? Where was FEMA? Why didn’t the government come and help us? What took them so long?’ Then some people started getting a bit rambunctious, tempers started to get a little high. (Voice lowers.) Actually, I’m wondering why there’s so little of a police presence here. (Raises voice to a normal level again.) But the other night somebody was playing some music out back here and everybody was really getting into it. It was a real community feeling. It was fun.”

“I would’ve enjoyed seeing that,” I said.

As we were turning back into one of the halls two young men asked me to take their picture. I thought they were evacuees, and they kept saying something about “Graebel,” which I assumed must be some neighborhood near New Orleans, but they turned out to be delivery drivers for a trucking company of that name. They’d brought in a bunch of supplies and were apparently just inordinately proud of their company.

On the other side of the hall I told Matt, “This is pretty intense. I’m having trouble not bawling at some of this.”

“Oh, I know it. You think this is something, you should see it when families get re-united. I had to step outside a few times when I saw that. (To a pair of policemen) Hey fellas, you’re doin’ a great job!”

Out in the corridor Matt introduced me to “the real queen of this place,” a young black woman who had set up a beauty salon on the premises. Actually I didn’t think the idea of a beauty salon in an evacuation shelter such a far-fetched idea. I can imagine after spending days wallowing in mud, blood, sewage, and industrial waste in the streets, then dealing with the hellish conditions in either the Superdome or the New Orleans Convention Center, that it would be a great psychological boost for the women and girls to feel beautiful again. I may have to go back and interview that woman and write an article about her.

Just past the make-shift basketball court outside I spotted a group of dogs and Miniature horses. Matt let me out a door that was locked from the outside so I could go investigate.

A group called “Hearts and Hooves” had brought these little animals to provide animal therapy for the traumatized people, especially the children. Petting and being around animals helps bring down stress and blood pressure, and often people with deeply-internalized traumas can explain their problems to and bond with animals in a way they can’t with people.

I fell into a conversation with one of the volunteers, but soon realized I had to write an article about this. She told me how one day she set up outside the Convention Center and a large group of children gathered around her. One was an eleven-year-old boy with a shell-shocked look. He’d lost several members of his family, including his aunt and grandmother.

The lady suggested that if he needed a shoulder to cry on he should talk to one of the little horses. He took the horse, went off in a corner, and sat with him for the longest time. Finally he came back, gave the lady the horse’s lead, thanked her, and said he felt a lot better. She said he did in fact look as if he’d been relieved of a great burden. He then went back inside the Convention Center.

Not five minutes later the kid came running back outside, excitedly shouting that they’d found his grandmother. He took the volunteer in to meet her, but his grandmother was off somewhere getting processed.

Before I left I took several pictures. One lady picked up what I think was a Schnauzer. In the background three men were walking away, one with a T-shirt saying something like “WHO YOU CALLING THE BIG DOG?” I tried to frame the dog and the T-shirt up in a shot, but someone stepped in the way.

Matt and I made our way past the crowded Health and Human Services, Social Security, and Red Cross sections. We ducked into one of the medical treatment areas and talked with a doctor and a few other health care people, then went back into the corridor.

Matt needed to go to the bathroom, but was worried about leaving me out there with no pass or ID. He said if I just stayed in that one spot and didn’t walk around, I should be okay. He also explained the situation to a couple security guards. (This made me feel like a five-year-old.)

While he did his business I looked around at the resources that were available within a few feet.

At the foot of the stairs was the press credentials table. About thirty feet away a few people were taking their seats for an AA meeting. And forty feet from that came the unusual sounds of Vietnamese evacuees chanting during a Catholic Mass.

That day was quite a bit to take in. I felt useless, impotent, superfluous. I wasn’t a doctor, a priest, a counselor. I couldn’t tell people how to find work or figure out their government benefits.

I stayed up late Tuesday writing my column and the Hearts and Hooves article. I slept most of Wednesday, getting up around 6pm. My publisher had called around 4pm, saying he’d heard the Neville Brothers were supposed to give a surprise benefit concert for Katrina relief at the Convention Center at 4:45. I later e-mailed him that while I would’ve loved to attend the concert, I was way the hell up in the Northwest part of town with no car, and a round-trip cab ride down there and back was about $50 to $60.

He had also wanted me to write about the history of flooding in Austin for my local history column this week.

The more I thought about it the more convinced I was that the topic was in bad taste and exploitative of the tragedy. I wound up writing the column, but book-ended it on the front with a rant about the way the government botched things, then wrapped up with an explanation that since history shows that Austin is also vulnerable to disastrous flooding, we are morally obligated to give to the relief efforts not only now, but long after the media gets bored with the story.

The column turned out okay, but I still had my doubts, and shared them with my publisher. As it turns out, his brother-in-law’s article on the shelter was so long most of the columns got bumped from this issue, so presumably the horse article and a different history column will appear in the next one.

You can already tell the media is trying to wrap this story up. Bush gave his little speech in the French Quarter, promising another War on Poverty. Parts of New Orleans have already been re-opened. Yet animal rescuers are still trying to get injured and starving pets from the area, there’s no potable water, the police are sleeping in their cars, the town stinks of shit and death, and the people who will be doing the actual job of physically rebuilding the city, are many miles away, lost, dazed, and disgusted.

[NOTES: What follows is material I learned after posting this or material I had to suppress at the time.

A few days after the first wave of evacuees arrived in Austin from Louisiana, a huge number of people in the public and private sector were working long hours at the Convention Center and the Palmer Special Events Center to make sure Austin’s newest residents had all that they needed. At City Hall, everything except Katrina got put on the back burner.

About the middle of the second night, the dirty towels and bed linen at the Convention Center had really piled up. As I recall, laundry facilities had broken down, and for some reason, delivery trucks weren’t available. Mayor Wynn grabbed two large, wheeled laundry carts, told his staff and whoever else was in earshot to do the same, and he led the way up the street, lugging laundry carts about three blocks to what was then the closest hotel.

He then went into the hotel and announced, “I’m Mayor Wynn, and we just brought all this laundry from the Convention Center and need the use of your laundry facilities.” (I confess I tear up whenever I think of that story.)

Because many of the evacuees had lost all their records and some were in too delicate of a mental state to remember important information about themselves, the potential for inside and outside parties to take advantage of this emergency to engage in fraud was great. The staffers were working to process the evacuees quickly, before clever people with a criminal turn of mind could figure out the system’s loopholes.

A nurse told me and Matt about a young man who showed up at the Convention Center and the Palmer Special Events Center, dressed like a slob in T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, claiming he wanted to help in any way he could. He gave his real name, but he did not identify himself as someone fairly high up in a media position, and his mode of dress was apparently chosen so as not to draw attention to himself.

This guy took a liking to an old man at Palmer. They’d talk and hang out. Many a time the old man missed his scheduled nurse visits because he was outside smoking with his new friend. The old man seemed to have no family, and was so out of it mentally he thought he was still in New Orleans. As the days went by, the young man told the nurses that he was going to take the old man into his own home and take care of him himself.

All of this sent up a red flag with the nurses. They were just sure this guy was planning to use the old man and steal his benefits. When the one nurse told me this I said that maybe the young man wasn’t planning a fraud, but instead wanted to exploit the old man as the focus of a news story.

Whatever the young man’s motives, they were thwarted. The nurses did some research, and found that the old man had a grand-daughter in West Texas, and she came and rescued the old man before the sneaky young journalist could check him out of the shelter.]