Texas Allegedly

For the reader unaware, condensed visits to my native Houston with their albatrosses and communal inspections often annoy me with a considerable flagrance (and possibly make me insane). I invoke last year's Thanksgiving ramble as a primer for a dilettante on the psychosis. I love my house, some of the surrounding blocks, some of the people in the surrounding neighborhoods, and of course, the friends and family, but the rest of Houston...well...last year's Thanksgiving ramble.

This year's dose of self-involvement: I stepped off the plane at George Herbert Walker Bush Intercontinental Airport into 84 degree weather. But by nighttime it was below 50 following the thunderstorm and downpour that eventually tore the side of our bordering fence from its mooring. On the car ride home, my sister and I discuss how the sky in Houston actually appears to be physically larger than the skies appear to be in other places (I reference our state anthem for common evidence). It's because of how nauseatingly flat the city is. I supress the urge in me that wants to like it.

We detour past our old house on Waverly Court; we left it when I was 13, I've had exactly one entire other life since leaving. It was torn down and rebuilt as a spec house, large, cold, forbidding, ugly. I wanted it for some reason, a redemption; it still had the hundred year old oak in the front yard, the monkey grass where I ... as a kid.

The new house was ugly, after years of sitting on the market, it was torn down. Almost as bad to see a new house on top of your old house is to see an empty lot where the new house once lived. It's like the perimeter had an entire other life as well since we left it. We mean nothing to it. Like a bled-through heart, a house was raised, a house was razed.

The house next door was also now torn down and the lots combined, It will either be a Texas-sized house next or apartments (knowing the trend in Houston). All that remains is the hundred year oak tree, sliced from the lot by a fence.

In Houston, I go out with friends and see other people I'm ready to not see again. I wake up at 6:15 to run 6.2 miles in the uncharacteristic cold and then go home and share a cigarette with my sister. The first dinner home, I see a girl some of us semi-dated and she thrusts her fiance at us. At the bar, one of the other émigrés to New York talks about his bonus. At breakfast, I see the poster girl for forbidden and stunning gentile fruit from senior year sociology class, the one who dated the baseball player who was a cocky asshole and never made it to the majors.

She introduces herself to me and says we had a class together (as if I'd forgotten), I say that I remember her from sociology. A smile creeps across my face... "Best year of my life," I tell her, sarcastic without cessation. You don't understand, I couldn't say a word to this girl in high school, my throat got big, my palms were slick. "I'm in New York now, I'm a writer," I answer her questions like I'm working for the family business (sort of true). "I'm in Houston, bumming around" she says, otherwise shrugging, "I'm thinking about maybe going to Denver." What ego does honesty have?

These are not big moments or moral victories, but they are revelations. Revelations are patterns, layers of mind and affirmation, mediums of artwork like sculpture that are ended and unalterable; impervious to edification, they mean nothing beyond the tips of one's own body; but when placed in the context of whatever, whatever, etcetera, whatever, where two people are sharing the other as reflecting glass, dissecting what tangled history had led them both to this point, doing all the math and wondering, whatever whatever whatever.

Do I get points for busting out of Houston? You bet. Half the fun of leaving is to say you left. But I'm feeling bad (in the "I'm baaaad" kind of way). I flirt none, I inquire no further, I make no flimsy, assailable plans, request no numbers from my high school wet dream and go on with my breakfast. My friend Joe and I recount what's just happened. There are million better than her in New York. I see them everyday. Truer words were never spoken.

My sister and I get out of the car and walk around the lot of our old house. We take a few pictures, talk about what could have been, admire the street, drive down our old block and around the cul-de-sac. I forgot what an idyllic street scene I grew up with; what view I saw every morning, and what faithless revelations that forced us to abandon it (nary a big moment nor moral victory were involved).

We stop for coffee in the village, we have a smoke on Sunset Boulevard (probably my first ever smoke there) and I start worrying that someone is gonna catch me and bust me. I put out the butt and find a place for it; in New York, I would have flicked it (diabolically) at the nearest taxicab. I go into the French cafe, the one of my youth where as a chubby, traif-devouring kid I tore through more ham-and-cheese croissants than Marcel Marceau (who never got his toasted because he was true to his method.

The feelings rush back, with more potency than if psychotropic drugs were evincing them (they weren't), the smells were the same, I now knew more French, could translate what the mural on the wall there still says. I remind my sister about when they offered free coffee to anyone who could sing the French national anthem by heart. We talk about that being our favorite part in the movie Casablanca. I always knew the coffee there would be good, I was always too young to drink it. No mas. The croissant was just alright. Fuck it.

I give my sister the Merwin poem to read about being home for Thanksgiving; in the distance the aforementioned tempest collects, she loves the poem, reads it aloud on Morningside, resting against the trunk of my old green Volvo. She reads the last line: I did the right thing after all.