by Jack Olsen
Around four-thirty she dozed off, only to jump up several hours later with the apprehension that her son was in serious trouble. She checked his bed; it was undisturbed. The phone lay cold and silent on its cradle. She telephoned a few young people around the neighborhood and learned that Malley and David had been seen talking to a man in a white van and that they had climbed in and been driven off, but the report was vague and insubstantial. No one was certain of anything, except that Malley was gone, and David along with him.
Gerry Winkle had no idea where to turn. The very next morning—and every Monday morning—Malley was supposed to call his probation officer, and there already had been severe warning that he would be sent to the reformatory at Gatesville if he broke probation or got into any new trouble. Uncertain of the possibilities, Gerry Winkle paced the floor and deliberately avoided calling the police for help. “I just looked at the walls,” she said later, “and hoped to God he’d come back.”
Murdertown
—Sumerian tablet, about 3500 B.C. The city, where the tumult of man is.
HOUSTON, TEXAS, IS A CULTURE DISH of urban sprawl, a baffling and stultifying and astonishing congeries of good taste, bad taste and no taste scattered across five hundred square miles of flat Gulf coastal plains. It is also a vaporous cauldron where tempers are short and murder rates are high and there are few restraints, least of all on the God-given right to accumulate money.
The wonder is that a metropolis of any magnitude should have come to life in the middle of the scrub brush and salt grass, unrelieved by mountain or hint of hill to shield the scalding sun. But there stands Houston, a sleepy country town thirty years ago, now rich and prospering and loudly proud, suddenly the nation’s sixthlargest city and clearly destined for third place behind those old beldames, New York and Chicago. Houston is growth and Houston is boom, and every local neophile will tell you: Houston is the future of the United States.
What meets the eye downtown is a cluster of glassy buildings, some of them mirrored and buffed to a high shine, reflecting one another in bronze and silver and gold. A few are garnished with pools and fountains the color of lapis lazuli (dye added) and here and there are tightly coiffured ornamental trees or modernistic artworks of finespun wire and hammered brass. The entire downtown business section is sealed by freeways, choked with traffic and offered in sacrifice to the great god Commerce, including the alcoholic-beverage industry that supplies a noxious Skid Row. Until the power shortage brought its demise, a big lighted orange wafer bearing the word “Gulf” rotated over one of the tallest buildings, and a subtle petroleum scent completed a vague impression of a giant, ultramodern filling station.
But atop one of these downtown buildings the visitor soon learns that there is more to Houston than meets the nose. In almost every direction, satellite groupings of clustered towers and spheres sprout from a broad emerald blanket of trees and bushes and golf-green lawns. The effect is as though one were standing at the center of a fairy ring of cities, each with its own stylistic personality, ranging from the blockily functional Lyndon B. Johnson Spacecraft Center to the southeast to the glaring white façades of the huge grain elevators to the northwest, and every edifice looking in the fresh rain as though a clean-up team had just finished its work. There is every conceivable type of design, from the outhouse simplicity of the old rural South to soaring minarets and fluted granite columns and gold-leafed domes, and still the young architects and engineers stream toward Houston, sniffling money and challenge, as fast as they can finish college. Several hundred of them labor at a single project: a $1.5 billion plan by a huge corporation to transform thirty-two blocks along Main Street into “a city in the sky,” with parking for forty thousand cars, a shopping center with parks and fountains and arcades high above the city, and sealed tubes to transport people like blow darts, rapidly and painlessly and screaming all the way, encased in plastic carriers.
At night, Houstonians descend from their spectacular office buildings and villages to mansions with Neo-Gothic arches and Grecian pillars, to condominiums with mansard and gambrel roof lines and Potemkin fronts. But mostly they flee to tract houses, tens of thousands of them fabricated of ticky-tacky and cinder block and huddled together like the green houses of Monopoly, providing protection from rain and sun while their mortgagors wriggle in upward mobility, like spermatozoa. After 6 P.M., the swarming downtown section becomes deserted, a struck set, peopled only by merchant seamen seeking the action, bored security guards and a few promenading blacks looking in store windows.
Until the power shortage imposed national limitations, Houston remained stubbornly incandescent; the fossil fuels that created the city’s wealth were treated as though inexhaustible. Even at three and four in the morning, luxurious landscapes in rich sections like River Oaks were flooded by spotlights of many colors, improving on nature, and name plates and address numbers were splashed with yellow rays from hooded gas jets that were never extinguished. Long necklaces of soft blue mercury lights reached for miles along major streets like Main and Travis and Milam, twinkling southward toward the Warwick Hotel, with its glass outdoor elevator, down past the green-neon-tipped Shamrock Hilton, and even farther south to the shallow parabolic curve of the Astrodome, Houston’s pride, a $32 million stadium where men play games in air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, rainless, sunless, breezeless comfort.
Houston, like Cairo, Egypt, lies athwart the thirtieth parallel, farther south than Casablanca, Baghdad, Algiers, more southerly than any part of Spain or Portugal, Italy or Greece. “Try to remember, Bill,” a visitor wrote in 1885, “hell and houston both begin with a h.” The city is an open sauna, relieved now and then by punishing thunderstorms and showers, and in summer by the odd hurricane. There are more air conditioners per capita than in any city in the world; even the public transportation is refrigerated. Houston boasts a “no-sweat set,” affluent citizens who step from air-conditioned homes into air-conditioned limousines and drive to air-conditioned offices, taking their ease in the evening at air-conditioned restaurants and clubs and watching air-conditioned sports events. They are the lucky ones. The typical working-stiff Houstonian is drenched by perspiration except when he is drenched by rain.
In recent years, this community so lacking in meterological advantage has been second only to Orange County, California, in rate of growth, moving quickly from what one observer called wilderness to bewilderness in a tiny parenthesis of time. World War II accelerated the exploitation of the Gulf Coast’s rich hoards of oil and sulphur and natural gas, and rural depressions after the war sent thousands of hungry farmers sputtering toward the city in their jalopies. Battening on both trends, Houston doubled and trebled and quadrupled its population, and its growth shows no signs of abating. Along the fifty miles of the Houston Ship Channel, linking the city to the Gulf of Mexico, a massive marine-industrial complex has risen from meadows that once were the domain of muskrats and mink. Rice and wheat and other grains are sluiced into ships from giant spouts, while sweating blacks wearing respirators level the loads with rakes. Tons of baled cotton and whole boxcars of paper move out of the port, and so many gallons of oils and acids and liquefied gases and other petrochemical products that Houston has moved to third place among U.S. ports in total tonnage, even though the city itself has all the seafaring atmosphere and tradition of Indianapolis.
Unemployment is low, especially among skilled laborers and artisans, and the workingman makes enough money to live comfortably. His immediate superiors, the foremen and managers and supervisors, move into tony areas like Memorial and Tanglewood, sometimes buying more than they can afford, falling for real-estate come-ons designed to appeal to their competitive natures (“Your subordinates cannot afford to live here”). The oil rich wallow in their oil riches, increasing every year.
One Houston millionaire bought a hotel and assigned his wife to redo it, thus indulging her taste for interior decoration on a grand scale; he built public fountains and named them after himself, and
he stocked his ranch with exotic game and rode to the hunt on half-tracks with machine guns. A Houston woman reported the theft of a mink coat—from her pickup truck. A furrier who knew the tastes of his rich customers sent out a letter: “I am taking bids from several people on a mink bedspread…. The bidding will start at ten thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in Texas, or at twenty-five thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in existence.” Roy Hofheinz, creator of the Astrodome and former Houston mayor, said he thought he had made his first million by the time he was forty, but he was unable to pinpoint the date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” Hofheinz said. Not in Houston.
This emphasis on the stockpiling of money has not always left time and energy for community planning, for human problems and sharings and mutuality. Forty-three years ago, Houstonians were advised by hired consultants to decide whether they were “building a great city or merely a great population.” The city fathers opted for population, for economic growth, for more and more residents with more and more spending power. Through the years, any regulations that would inhibit the dollar flow have been summarily rejected. Thus Houston finds itself in 1973 with no zoning laws. If a man wants to set up a chili stand next to a monastery or shooting gallery by an old folks’ home, no zoning law can stop him. The attitude toward public advertising is equally laissez-faire; despite the proximity of Lady Bird Johnson’s aerie to the west, Houston has never been able to enact reasonable billboard control and the approaches to the city affront and assault the eye. City politicians have been slow to pass laws restricting real-estate development, and housing codes are paper tigers.
“My very first impression of Houston,” said a Purdue professor in 1966, “was that this is not a city for pedestrians. It was built for people on wheels. The pedestrian here is a nonentity….” Daily some 1.3 million cars move about and through and over and under the city, traveling nearly 30 million passenger-miles on five thousand miles of paved streets and freeways. Hydrocarbons and lead oxides and other noxious fumes blend with the aroma of the petrochemical industry, and almost every afternoon a death cap of fouled air plops down upon the city. The Gulf humidity holds the chemicals in suspension and there are frequent “air stagnation advisories.” Once signs were posted at the city limits: “Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.” They were the work of the Harris County Pollution Control Board, fighting another losing skirmish with industrial boosters and boomers.
Houston’s nickname, “The Bayou City,” suggests a sublime region of slow-moving streams shaded by majestic trees, a Texas version of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte, but most of the bayous were lined with concrete years ago and have all the sylvan charm of the Harlem River. Buffalo Bayou, once “a most enchanting little stream,” was deepened and broadened into the Houston Ship Channel, described a few years ago by a federal pollution commissioner as “one of the worst polluted bodies of water in the nation. In fact, on almost any day this channel may be the most badly polluted body of water in the entire world.” Houstonians shrugged, and went on making money. As an astute Houston Post editor, George Fuermann, wrote: “[Houston’s leaders] almost always do manage, as they would say, ‘to get the job done.’ It has been our misfortune that most of the jobs they choose to get done are material; few are altruistic or humanitarian or even, in the larger sense, community.” While Astrodomes and Astrohalls and Astroworlds are rushed to completion, undernourished blacks and overnourished rats battle each other for survival in the fourth ward, just across Interstate 45 from downtown. The rats are ahead.
The West begins two hundred miles away in San Antonio. Houston is the South; its settlers were of the same pioneering stock that built Atlanta and Tallahassee and Birmingham, and Houston was the capital of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department. Camellias and oleanders are rampant, crape myrtle and black willow abound, and corn whiskey is still highly prized, whether as country-brewed “white lightning” in Mason jars or fancified sourmash bourbon in heirloom bottles. Constant trafficking with northern and eastern businessmen has converted many Houstonians to Scotch, a liquor that comes conveniently up the ship channel, directly from Clydeside. Beer is the beverage of Houston’s blue-collar workers; it flows out of four major breweries that sometimes fall behind demand, setting off clamors and cries that an industry so basic to the people’s needs should be more responsible. Local experts have claimed, in perfect seriousness, that in summers of particular drought more beer is consumed in Houston than water.
The people are young, befitting a growing area. The median age is 27.5, contrasted with 35 for New York. Anglo-Saxon whites predominate, but Houston has also experienced infusions of ethnic groups-Germans and Czechs and Poles from the old country and from American ghettos, Cajuns from Louisiana, Indians from the Southwest, Mexicans from Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Coahuila, blacks from the cotton country. Most of the ethnics have been thoroughly assimilated into the city’s life. The blacks and Mexicans, like Faulkner’s Dilsey, endure.
In matters of dress and personal style, the people keep watch on Dallas, which in turn looks to other big cities like New York and Paris. There is a lag and Houston is sometimes a turn or two out of phase with the self-appointed satraps of fashion. One sees women strapped into old-fashioned uplift brassières that shove their breasts forward like stilettos. Businessmen wear loudly contrasting outfits accented by chalk-white belts and shiny white patent-leather shoes, and in off-hours climb into one-piece jump suits in imitation of the city’s social monarchs, the astronauts.
Houston has never pretended to be a center of style or design, nor is it historically renowned for contributions to literature or the arts. Traditionally it has been a workingman’s town, too busy to be bothered by the airy conceits of culture. Beleaguered local literati are quick to note that O. Henry lived in Houston (for eight months in the 1890’s); except for him, The Bayou City cannot point to a single homebred creative artist of note. But one hears repeatedly that Howard Hughes was born in Houston and that the Hughes Tool Company, keystone of his antic financial kingdom, remains in the city. As in all matters local, commerce is ascendant.
The spoken language tends toward unabashed polyglot, the general dialect falling loosely within the boundaries of southern speech, but with distinct peculiarities of sound and usage. Way is pronounced why; horse becomes harse; and car, core. Slender sounds like sunder, laugh is pronounced life, and grass is grace or grice. Words like heights and like and store are split asunder (haw-eets, law-eek, stow-er), and there are genuine relic usages such as aks for ask, traceable to the Old English verb acsian or aksian. A ghostly r comes out of nowhere and slips into words like swallow, pronounced swaller, or is shifted around in words like the four-syllable Pedernales, which becomes the two-syllable Perdnails, or is dropped entirely from words like very, often pronounced ve’y. A dialect dividing line runs from Freeport, on the Gulf Coast, northwest toward Amarillo; the line roughly separates the area of hill-country cowboy pronunciation from the area of the distinctive East Texas rural accent, and it pierces the very innards of Houston, so that both dialects are heard, sometimes from the same speaker, with overtones of Cajun French that came up the bayou from Louisiana. One also encounters remnants of Texas German, Texas Spanish (sometimes called Tex-Mex), Texas Czech and Polish and Ukrainian, all reminders of the city’s deep ethnicity. A waitress commands her customers at the end of a meal, “Y’all vill pleece come back! Heah?” Newly transplanted from Germany, she works in a French restaurant that serves spaghetti Bolognese, not far from a Japanese restaurant that pushes Saint-Emilion and Liebfraumilch with the teppan-yaki. In matters nationalistic, Houston is relaxed.
Mythology and Shakespeare hold that murder will out, but the statement has never been absolutely true, and certainly not in Houston. Violence is as much a part of the city’s heritage as the post oaks and the bayous. When it was a tiny frontier town, Houston was described by a diarist
as “the greatest sink of disipation [sic] and vice that modern times have known.” An early diplomat wrote: “I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town during my stay on the coast committed there, than throughout the whole of Texas.” A bishop proclaimed in 1843 that “there is a great need for a deep, a thorough, a sweeping revival of religion in Houston,” and more than a century later Billy Graham, wielding his customary theological meat ax, warned Houstonians that most of them “will spend an eternity in hell.”
The specialty was homicide, no undeveloped art in any part of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the top of a tower and killed fourteen in little more than an hour, where Lee Harvey Oswald sniped John F. Kennedy, and where Jack Ruby, in turn, slew Oswald in front of a paralyzed assemblage of police officers.
In 1957, Houston had the highest per capita murder rate in the United States, earning the cognomen “The Murder City,” and it has never been far out of contention. In 1966, there were five dozen more victims in Houston than in all of England. In a typical year, Houston doubles London’s total number of murders, and London is six times as large and far more densely populated. In his definitive book Houston: The Once and Future City,* George Fuermann recounts a popular limerick:
In Houston we feel no aversion
When others are casting aspersion;
We never mind much
