The People "Alive" Don't Know
After an epic night in Slumberland, my two companions and I walk slowly down a redbrick road (East Avenue, Austin, decades ago) long and lined with tall old houses falling into stately ruin …
“It’s the old Chisholm Trail paved over for our convenience,” I say, “now known as Tallulah Bankhead’s Talisman Highway to Heaven and Beyond” and the road suddenly curves—no longer brick-paved but asphalt cracked and weedgrown winding, and now I’m in a rattly car, my uncle driving steeply up we climb the eastern Welcome Mountain: below is Mineral Wells, the Baker Hotel and two grinning blackface chefs (Shorty and the other one) sweating on the rooftop as they cook a giant burger, smoke signals steaming upward to misty blue Eternal Sky …
Then higher and higher and higher, and around we go those hairpin curves, down stomach-dropping dips and up and up beyond the gray old rickety houses built into the thorny rocky side of El Paso vistas: ramshackle wooden structures perched precarious on vertiginous cliffs of imminent doom, then higher upward to the veritable summit bumping over potholes and up the bouncy paradigm Perdition and Paradise and pants-pissing fear, passing clapboard cottages hidden so deep in animal-puppet mouth-yakking thicket where up a rocky pathway (in 1950s half-remembered gray-morning gloom I played with Capt. Kangaroo Christmas drawing-toy and cuckoo clock?) beyond Weatherford …
And there I see a thorny passageway where Granny in her bonnet chased a snake out of her garden, its tubular back shiny and black go sliding into the brittle grass and foot-sticking-cactus-under-the-bridge-with-Chevy-on-the-bike beneath the wooden fence with missing slats and into dusty hazy half-light (black-and-white Comedy Capers and Slam-Bang Theatre madness and mayhem) comes ragged flapjack eatin' Li’l Jack in goat-drawn wagon, Crazy Water fishing pole and worm cans rattling in the back) …
And at last, find myself in Forgotten Town (down below the people “alive” don’t know) … run-down buildings and crooked brickwork … rickety shacks and weedy rubble … grocery store with empty bubblegum machines in front and a broken Kiddie Rocket Ride rusting in the sun … tobacco-spattered sidewalks … cigarette butts … chicken bones … broken glass …
Then down the other side of the mountain (getting dark) the perilous graveyard winding path lined with broken statues … crumbling monuments, ancestors’ testaments … stone bust of an Injun Chief falling off its crooked chimney-redrock pedestal and crashing, barely missing us ...
Then come the meteors pelting as we run … Apocalypse, Apocalypse, a pox upon us all …
“It’s the old Chisholm Trail paved over for our convenience,” I say, “now known as Tallulah Bankhead’s Talisman Highway to Heaven and Beyond” and the road suddenly curves—no longer brick-paved but asphalt cracked and weedgrown winding, and now I’m in a rattly car, my uncle driving steeply up we climb the eastern Welcome Mountain: below is Mineral Wells, the Baker Hotel and two grinning blackface chefs (Shorty and the other one) sweating on the rooftop as they cook a giant burger, smoke signals steaming upward to misty blue Eternal Sky …
Then higher and higher and higher, and around we go those hairpin curves, down stomach-dropping dips and up and up beyond the gray old rickety houses built into the thorny rocky side of El Paso vistas: ramshackle wooden structures perched precarious on vertiginous cliffs of imminent doom, then higher upward to the veritable summit bumping over potholes and up the bouncy paradigm Perdition and Paradise and pants-pissing fear, passing clapboard cottages hidden so deep in animal-puppet mouth-yakking thicket where up a rocky pathway (in 1950s half-remembered gray-morning gloom I played with Capt. Kangaroo Christmas drawing-toy and cuckoo clock?) beyond Weatherford …
And there I see a thorny passageway where Granny in her bonnet chased a snake out of her garden, its tubular back shiny and black go sliding into the brittle grass and foot-sticking-cactus-under-the-bridge-with-Chevy-on-the-bike beneath the wooden fence with missing slats and into dusty hazy half-light (black-and-white Comedy Capers and Slam-Bang Theatre madness and mayhem) comes ragged flapjack eatin' Li’l Jack in goat-drawn wagon, Crazy Water fishing pole and worm cans rattling in the back) …
And at last, find myself in Forgotten Town (down below the people “alive” don’t know) … run-down buildings and crooked brickwork … rickety shacks and weedy rubble … grocery store with empty bubblegum machines in front and a broken Kiddie Rocket Ride rusting in the sun … tobacco-spattered sidewalks … cigarette butts … chicken bones … broken glass …
Then down the other side of the mountain (getting dark) the perilous graveyard winding path lined with broken statues … crumbling monuments, ancestors’ testaments … stone bust of an Injun Chief falling off its crooked chimney-redrock pedestal and crashing, barely missing us ...
Then come the meteors pelting as we run … Apocalypse, Apocalypse, a pox upon us all …
posted by Mack White at 10:51 AM
