Rodeo: Part I

It was exactly a week ago on one shining, mild and temperate Texas day—a Saturday—that friends and I embarked on the Mengele experiment in sociological wire-walking that is the Rodeo Houston.

This beginning sentence is not adequate, but I’m not sure eloquence is what’s being wasted here. I recently read a piece in the New Yorker **see how I’ve already ruined the rodeo for myself ** about drinking. It was by Malcolm Gladwell, the gold-standard (ubiquitous, self-promoting) dissector of laymen conditions or, in other words, the Shmuely Boteach of how we live. In it, Gladwell talks about how alcohol is not an inhibition-shedder so much as it is a force that causes myopia. When we drink, we focus strictly on what’s in front of us with a certain compulsion, good or bad or both, and the rest of the background becomes blurry. It’s a good read. So now when I tell you that I was drunk at the rodeo, whatever I do say should have that salt grain attached.

Speaking of salt, when I arrived to meet friends at the Mexican restaurant across the highway from the rodeo, there were baskets of chips and pitchers of frozen margaritas awaiting me. That’s where the story begins. It was a chain restaurant, which is sort of a way of life in Houston, but a good fat one. You pay for convenience and you pay for what’s safely known (Experiments are hard to build consensus on in Houston). The food is still good, but the pitchers now cost $30. You tell someone local you went to Pappasito’s for lunch, you’d never have to describe the experience for them, they’d just say “yup.”

We ate and drank and ogled people in the restaurant, rednecks and the like, teenage girls in short shorts whose crucifixes rested shiny in their cleavage, Texas-sized people whom the wait staff had to sidestep beneath their trays. Myopically directed, I focused on the bones we’d have broken by the rednecks, the years in jail I’d get for the underage girls, the number of rolls overspilling from the sausage casing of the large people. "I" also meant the men at the table, I (as usual) had no idea what the women were thinking.

We arrive at the fairground which, by Houston code, is held in the space between two completely opposite shaped stadiums. The Astrodome is...a dome. But you cannot just say it that flippantly because it was the first dome in the world. The first. You could house an eighteen story building inside of it. Artificial grass is called AstroTurf because of the Astrodome.

They called it the Gray Lady, the Eighth Wonder of the World. Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs did battle there. 13,000 Katrina refugees took shelter there. Baseballs that would be home runs with lengths to spare died in the Astrodome outfield. It was a place where for years I faithfully went to church on Sundays, watching Warren Moon (#1) perform ably for 60,000 disciples. When he threw for a score, we’d rise with our arms up. God owned the Houston Oilers and, with deistic fickleness, one day he moved them to Tennessee where there was no oil. I was 16 when this happened. That should say enough.

The Astrodome now looks on the verge of collapse from neglect. The letters are falling off the sides. The baseball team moved out over a decade ago. But it will never be torn down. Not unless the mayor of Houston decides he or she doesn’t want to be in office anymore. I should add, perhaps, that the current mayor of Houston is a lesbian. We’re the biggest American city with an openly gay mayor. All social progress aside, if she even suggested tearing down the Dome, they wouldn’t let her deliver the mail. The Astrodome will never be put out to pasture. It will not be taken out back and shot. When it goes, it will fall in on itself. Everyone will just say “yup.”