Story

Iraan

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

I.

My mother’s father hated West Texas. He detested the sound of the wind over the plains, and the constant battle to keep the red dust out of the house. To be fair, he grew up in central Texas under the trees, and I think he came to the rolling plains after the war. My guess is that the drought of the 50s had a part in his hatred of the area. To be less than fair, my grandfather’s dislike for West Texas colored my opinion of him. That is probably when I first subconsciously used a person’s opinion of West Texas as a Litmus test of their righteousness.

My parents were far too poor to travel, so all my travel as a child was with my grandparents. Sometime in summer they would drive up from South Texas to pick me up, and we would spend several weeks fishing somewhere away from West Texas. At first it was in a slide in camper in the bed of my grandfather’s truck, but later they were able to buy a travel trailer. I saw a lot of south and east Texas state parks, and one trip to nearly the Canadian border. I begged them to take me to Carlsbad Caverns, but they said they were too old, and besides there wasn’t anything worth seeing in the desert anyway. As a child in love with the desert, it made me hyperaware of all the differences between my grandfather and me, and for a time I resented him for those differences.

II.

Map courtesy of USGS.

Three weeks before cancer killed him, my grandfather unfolded a map over the blanket covering his legs, and we travelled inches instead of miles, reliving trips we shared, and also taking each other down roads we had travelled alone. By then we both knew this was the last trip we would take together. He related the years he built electric transmission lines across the Great Plains, winter in northern Nebraska, late spring in South Dakota. Of riding a motorcycle around Taylor County after the war until he got married. I told him of my desert trips.

At some point his thin finger traced a path to Iraan,

“I’ve never cared for west Texas, but there is something about coming to the overlook above Iraan in the early morning or evening. Kind of a magical place. “

I learned a lot about that man in following few weeks. Some of which I’m still mulling nearly two decades later, but this bit about Iraan more than other things. I loathe taking the same path on the same trip; there’s too much country I haven’t seen in different seasons to waste time retracing my tracks. Just the same, I go out of my way to see Iraan from the overlook whenever I am in the area. Iraan is just a little town along the banks of the Pecos. It is probably the equivalent of “flyover country” for those speeding through to see Big Bend National Park, but I agree with my grandfather, if there is magic in this world, it is probably found overlooking Iraan in the twilight.

Iraan rest area, spring 2014. I suspect my grandfather actually meant the view of Iraan on the other side of town, looking east. I like it too, but I chose to make this one mine, as it is looking into West Texas.

McDonalds

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The homeless people of McDonalds.  Well, the homeless people of my routines. I see some of the same people at the library and the coffeehouse. As I mentioned in another post, when the library and coffee shop are closed on Sunday I sometimes spend hours in a McDonald’s studying.

They come in shifts. Once the shelter kicks some of them out for the day they show up scrubbed and clean. The  first shift comes in and some set up shop alone in a booth or on a stool and others sit together. Those on foot have a bag or two and those in cars and vans have only what they need to charge or use while inside. They are mostly quiet and respectful of others. The employee cleaning the dining room stops and talks to some of the regulars. I never see the loud ones more than a couple of Sundays.

The older man with the trilby and long still dark hair will bring his shave kit inside and when there are not many guests in the store, will slip into the bathroom to wash and shave. Back at his table he will brush his long hair out with a wood handled brush and drink his coffee while his phone charges. If I have a lot of studying to do I will see him leave and come back after dark. Last winter he carried a makeshift walking stick that looked more like a club, but I have not seen it this semester. 

Last income tax season there was a young guy staying in the shelter at night and spinning a sign for the tax place across the street. He had two cell phones. One which did not work and then his current one. He was one of those tragic figures who spent an hour telling his friend about the newest and greatest phone that did everything and was only $800 without a contract, and how if he had it, he would be set. He was telling his friend and any who would listen that he was about to make it. No, really make it big. Besides his DJ work, he was starting his own sign spinning business. Instead of working for the tax place he would contract out to them and several other places that really needed someone to spin signs and needed them to be spun right. I haven’t seen him since before the summer, so maybe he really did make it.

The old man living in the minivan could be mistaken for just another customer if you did not see him get out of his van and if he did not always wear rubber boots and did not carry his laptop in a old and stained insulated walmart grocery bag. He seems to make the rounds of town pretty well. I’ll see him in the library and then the coffeeshop across town. I don’t want to pry, but I am curious about where he parks at night. I have read a bit about living in van (research for when I move to Lubbock) and many people hop from Walmart to Walmart since many welcome overnight parking. Some other van dwellers pick residential streets near houses to avoid the scrutiny of cops. They’ll roll in just before bedtime and then leave before sunrise without moving around too much in the van. Some others get permission to stay at construction sites as a make shift free security service. I would like to ask this particular man about his strategy, but I do not want to pry.

Some of the people work for Labor Ready off and on. Labor Ready is a temp agency which markets on low end labor jobs. They pay every day. It is the more legal form of stopping outside of Home Depot to pick up some help to dig a ditch. I worked for them some in the late 90s. Back then you would have to be at the office by at least 5:30 or earlier, as that the jobs were first come-first serve unless someone was looking for a certain type of skilled worker. The office was a open hall with a dispatcher behind a desk, the smell of bad coffee and rows of chairs. Sleepy men would come in and sit and talk or sleep, waiting for a job. Yesterday you might have swept out a new building, today you might work 12 hours in a cold storage warehouse unloading 80 lbs sacks of peanuts, tomorrow you might spend four hours cleaning out a muddy ditch. Most jobs paid $5.15 a hour. If you did not have the required hard hat, or steel toed boots, the office would rent you a hard hat and rubber boots for $5.00. At the end of the day you would trudge back into the office with your signed time sheet and the dispatcher would print a check for your $35 or perhaps $50 if it was a really long day. Those were the good days. The bad days you spent the gas getting over to the office and wasted half a day waiting for a job that never came. If you were lucky, or at least less unlucky, the bad days were spread out enough so that you could swing by the plasma center to sell plasma.

A couple of homeless men I knew back then would camp in the alley behind the Labor Ready office since the shelter did not allow drinking, and they would rather sleep outside in January than be preached at about their vices. The dispatcher would try to pair them with me on jobs since I had a truck. So we spent the winter of 97 working together. They would save up some money and get a motel room at the cheapest, gas valves for sink faucets, motel in the area for a few nights here and there. Last time I saw them they were going to hop a train for Arizona.

Today, I do not know how it is at Labor Ready. I suspect it is still enough to keep a cell phone on and to buy a coffee and a couple of $1 chicken sandwiches at McDonalds on Sunday while you wait until the office is open again on Monday.

Story Fragment #1

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

At 75 I was alone. My wife was dead. My brothers were dead. After retiring from work either all my friends were dead or had drifted away; it happens when you leave a culture. So I went back to school. Majored in trying not to be lonely. I would take a science class or a geography class; last semester I even took a women’s studies class just to be a letch.

I enjoyed everything about it. The campus, the bustle, the learning that I would never use, the excitement and vitality of youth that surrounded me. I was still lonely, but not quite so alone. These kids are no different than the kids when I was young. More toys, more stuff, but the same basic dreams and hopes and angsts and all that you feel when you are feeling for the first time.

I’m still here, but things are starting to change. I forget I’m old. I don’t see my wrinkled face more than once a day and I forget not everyone’s knuckles are torn and bent and scarred. So many of the kids look a lot like kids I went to school with 60 years ago. Sometimes I forget that they are not those friends until I get close and see that they don’t look exactly like them. I know my doctor said to expect my memory to go more and more as things take hold, but it is still eerie.

In the mornings, I park on the far side of the campus and spend the time before class walking around the campus searching for memories that won’t surface anymore. Sometimes I remove my glasses and walk around in my nearsighted and myopic haze. It removes those slight differences between these kids and my friends. As long as I’m careful to not call out to them, I can walk with my schoolmates.