The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

Herman’s wife, Little Opal, had experienced a similar transformation. Her outfits sparkled and her makeup was perfect, and the sixties had taught her a few things about pantsuits. Her old churchiness had also relaxed, something her son Homer discovered in the mid-sixties. He was eating at the restaurant when his parents appeared dressed to the nines.

  “Where are y’all going?” Homer asked.

  “To the ball game,” Little Opal said.

  “The ball game? You never let me go to the ball game. What, did God change his mind?”

  Homer let it slide, no longer the angry boy. Time and fatherhood had softened his edges.

  But that was the state of things when I finally entered the world: salad days all around. No one had to jump boxcars like Bob during the Depression; we weren’t grieving over dead children the way we’d done with Mary Lou, Orville, and Jack; no mad drives out west to save us from the Devil and ourselves, and no having to burn tires to stay warm. At that moment, no one in my immediate family even worked on an oil rig. The day my memory came alive, our house in Midland had just sold for twelve grand over market, a white Cadillac was sitting under Opal’s carport, and my grandmother smelled of sweet Estée Lauder.

  She was putting me to bed in the back room, and her face was close to mine. Nearly two years old, I was already talking and had learned the name of my soon-to-be home. We were playing a game.

  “Mee-mee!” I said. This is what I called her. “Babel-kirky.”

  She threw her hands over her face and pretended to cry. “No, no, no! Don’t go to Babel-kirky!”

  “Mee-mee,” I said again. “Babel-kirky.” And on we went.

  I loved my Memie and was sad to leave her and Papaw, and I’m sure she was sad to see me go. But she knew something that I didn’t, that Albuquerque—more than West Texas—was the best place for my daddy to save himself from the Devil and his own flesh.

  * * *

  Albuquerque was an adventure. Neither Mom nor Dad had ever lived outside of Texas, and the clean break from Midland was a fresh start.

  In Albuquerque, we bought a little adobe house on the east side of town. And thanks to Zelda’s friend, Dad began selling cars at a giant dealership off the Coronado Freeway called Rich Ford, while Mom took an administrative job at the Bureau of Land Management. Most days, I stayed with Aunt Zelda, who taught me Sunday school songs and spoiled me with Fig Newtons.

  Under the guidance of his oldest sister, Dad became strong again in the Lord. He quit partying and started reading his Bible in the quiet mornings before breakfast. We joined Zelda and Charlie’s congregation at First Assembly of God. After church, Zelda cooked a pot roast and the men gathered in the living room to watch the Dallas Cowboys. These were the team’s glorious years, 1977–79, when Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, and Randy White led America’s Team to back-to-back Super Bowls.

  My memories from Albuquerque are few, yet it’s funny what stuck. I remember that a neighbor kept a giant model train set like the one on Mister Rogers that filled his basement from wall to wall. He’d designed little towns, forests, and tunnels, and one of the locomotives even blew steam as it chugged up the hills. And I remember the day Mom and I were driving in the car and heard on the radio that Elvis Presley was dead. The memory locked only because of the sound my mother made in response, a kind of gasp.

  I don’t remember Mom ever being pregnant, but nearly nine months after Elvis died, my sister was born. My cousin Tammy—Zelda’s oldest—came to stay with me while Mom and Dad were at the hospital. She brought along her fiancé, a former state-champ discus thrower from Eldorado High School named Mark Longerot. At three years old, I told Mark how I’d wanted a brother, but would still lobby my parents to name the girl after my favorite Dallas Cowboy, Tony Dorsett. Mark promised he would help, but it was no use. When my baby sister came home, her name was Marci.

  * * *

  As much as Dad enjoyed his new little girl, she arrived just as he started questioning our big adventure. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but Albuquerque was tough.

  Away from the oil boom, the city of 330,000 was like most everywhere else in the country, still suffering under high inflation and fuel prices and limping through a prolonged recession. Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories kept many people employed, but the economy was nothing compared to Midland. No big-swinging oilmen were paying cash for a new stepsider pickup.

  To Dad, Albuquerque felt like another country. It had Indians, which Dad had never encountered before. The food was different, people drove too fast, and Dad found these big-city folks to be mean and cutthroat. One day he said to Mom, “They must hate Texans here.”

  He learned this the hard way at work. Rich Ford was twice as big as Bill Rogers in Midland. Thirty salesmen prowled the lot, compared to four or five, and according to Dad, these men didn’t care if you lived to eat breakfast the next morning. Dad’s first week on the lot, he spent three hours with a customer, who left to go and get his wife. But when they returned later and asked for Dad, one of the salesmen lied and said he’d gone home, then closed the deal himself. That was called skating, and those sharks in Albuquerque would skate you with a smile, even while you stood and watched.

  Four hundred miles from home, Dad was in a foreign land, where his slow, sidewinding flattery was met with hardened stares, his sharp wardrobe screamed overkill, and friends were hard to come by. The old mojo was bootless, and his sunny confidence began to wane. For once, he went dark.

  Through the dealership, he met two men who’d opened their own used-car lot, a “tote-the-note” operation that catered to ex-cons and people with bad credit, and they were looking for a third partner. They’d leased a weedy stretch of asphalt along Central Avenue, the old Route 66, on the blighted edge of downtown. Outside they hung a banner that read: BUY HERE, PAY HERE. NO CREDIT? NO PROBLEM! WE FINANCE! The sign rippled against the traffic noise and the songs of drunks looking for the bus. Dad took in the scene, his own empire of dirt, then returned to Rich Ford and told them he quit.

  He leased a corner of the lot and sold his own cars, mostly high-mileage trade-ins the dealerships had shucked off to wholesalers: mid-sixties Chevelles and Bonnevilles, Vega GTs, a Falcon Coupe. They were old, but they ran fine—as far as Dad could tell. His partners, however, didn’t pretend to care. They sold clunkers to Indians, even coined their own warranty:

  As Long as the Waters Flow

  As Long as the Grass Is Green

  Or to the End of the Block

  It worked like this: Dad bought a car from the wholesaler for five hundred dollars, then advertised it for nine hundred. The buyer put five hundred dollars down, then financed the rest under the maximum interest allowed. Payments were made by the week, and in person. Fear the repo man if you fell behind.

  “The fastest way to get back on your feet,” his partners told people, “is to miss a payment.”

  Dad managed to move thirty cars his first couple of months. His customers were punctual, dropping by each Friday afternoon with handfuls of payday cash. But when his wholesaler ran low on inventory, Dad had nothing to sell. So he started buying dirt bikes, little Kawasakis he moved fairly fast but with little profit.

  Then one morning he came to work and saw that thieves had busted open the trailer where he stored the bikes and cleaned him out. He didn’t have insurance and the police were no help.

  From a guy who hung around the lot, Dad bought a little Smith & Wesson .38 for a hundred dollars cash, only because the man had papers proving it was clean. Dad tucked the pistol into his jeans and tried to feel at ease, but he couldn’t. The whole neighborhood had turned toxic in his mind, and he started feeling paranoid. The drunks and low riders cruising past suddenly beamed with menace.

  Eventually his conscience wrestled free, and he saw his customers for what they were—poor folks with few options. Hapless suckers not even aware of how much they were getting screwed because they’d been getting screwed their entire lives.

  “Can’t
you get a cosigner?” Dad asked a guy one day, a customer who just couldn’t qualify. The man shook his head. “Last cosigner I had, he never made one payment.”

  Dad knew he’d made a mistake, as if the pistol pressed into his back wasn’t already a sign. There had to be a different way.

  * * *

  Turned out there was, and it came from Big Boy Blue.

  Back in Odessa, his brother Preston had nearly worked himself into an early grave. After returning from Vietnam, he probably could have used some time to readjust, but with a baby on the way, he had to earn a living. The only job he could find was selling insurance for Metropolitan Life. He sold door-to-door, cold canvassing, like he’d done as a boy hawking manure in a tow sack. The work was torturous and every bit against his nature, but he did it for a year because there were bills to pay. Then for a while he tried selling vacuum cleaners—Filter Queens—but that job ended the day he flipped the wrong switch and blew dirt onto a woman’s dress.

  His father-in-law worked for El Paso Natural Gas, which had a plant in Odessa, and managed to get Preston hired. The pay was solid and he could choose his shifts, which made time for other things. Growing up around his uncle Herman, Preston had always wanted to start his own restaurant, and his tour in Vietnam had fostered in him a love of cooking. He and Linda prayed about the decision for several months. Then Preston borrowed the money from friends and family.

  He bought a little place on the corner of Tenth and Whitaker, spruced it up, and opened for business. Preston’s Place advertised “Good Home Cooking” and Preston cooked most of it himself, usually after graveyards at the plant, coming in early to bake biscuits and desserts from scratch. For the breakfast and lunch crowds, he served the standard bacon and eggs, hamburgers, and usually a blue plate special, like meatloaf or chicken-fried steak. Standing over a grill was tiring, but the work was wholly fulfilling. And better, word was spreading about how delicious the food was. Most days, the dining room was packed.

  But his job at the plant sucked away time from the restaurant, which proved his downfall. It turned out one of the women he hired was stealing food. Preston kicked himself for not noticing this earlier, but for whatever reason he didn’t. By the time he put the pieces together, he was in trouble. After only a year in business, Preston’s Place had to close.

  The failed restaurant buried him in debt, and now he was desperate. When a second child arrived, he picked up more shifts at the plant, and when that wasn’t enough, he took a night job unloading boxcars at the freight docks—all while taking college courses in mechanics and carpentry before his GI Bill expired. Days and nights bled together and he was rarely at home. His body and mind grew so tired that one evening at the plant he broke down in the yard, draped himself across one of the big steam lines, and begged the Lord for mercy.

  Get me out of this, he prayed.

  The next week, he got word that the plant was closing. But before he could register the bad news, recruiters from Monsanto and Amaco were there snatching up men for two facilities near Houston. The boom was on, and chemical companies had to compete with the oil patch for workers, even if it meant having to poach them. Dozens of guys applied for the jobs and were hired right away, including Preston. But still, the companies needed more. So Preston put in a good word for Dad, who hopped on a flight the next week for an interview. When he returned home, Mom looked at the grin on his face and saw another nine hundred miles of road. And she was right—we were moving back to Texas.

  * * *

  The Monsanto plant was located thirty miles south of Houston, in a little town called Alvin, where we moved just after Christmas 1978. Dad worked in the hydrocarbon unit as a board man, walking the pipe alleys where chemicals thrummed overhead into giant distillation columns, checking the pumps and gauges for any leaks or changes in pressure. It was an easy job and it paid well, even if it meant pulling graveyards.

  The transplants from Odessa called themselves the Sandblasters, and they were a tight and rowdy group. The night Dad started work, he wore blue jeans and a monogrammed belt buckle. One of the cowboys singled him out.

  “What’s the B stand for on that buckle, hoss?”

  “It stands for Big Bucks,” Dad said, without missing a beat. From that day forward he was Big Bucks Bob.

  Alvin was flat and swampy and thick with mosquitoes, but we enjoyed it because we were close to family. In addition to Dad, Preston also got Mark Longerot, the discus champ from Albuquerque, hired at the plant, and he and my cousin Tammy now rented a small apartment in town. Opal’s sister Veda and her husband Bill lived twelve miles south in Dickinson. Down the street from them lived Opal’s other sister, Dorothy.

  This unlikely family outpost along the Gulf marked the first time in decades that so many of us had lived together. Already, it had been forty years since Dorothy took a bus to New London and found her sister Agnes and her kids nearly starved after her husband walked out on them. Thirty years since Veda insisted on playing preacher, standing at the bedstead where time and again she sent poor Gloria Jean to hell. Agnes was long dead now, having passed suddenly in 1968 at the age of fifty-eight while undergoing gallbladder surgery (“I won’t survive,” she told Homer a week before the operation, and she was right).

  All the children of Clem and Cora—who died in 1970—now had grandkids of their own. Their hair was turning gray and their bodies were starting their slow march of revolt. On holidays we stood around Aunt Veda’s dining-room table, where Uncle Bill or Uncle Charlie offered up the Oh Heavenly Father before the meal. Afterwards, we all pressed into the living room to watch football and home movies of family reunions past. The old films brought back the dead and for a brief moment, they were among us, back with the choir. Each movie ended with the whole gang singing around a piano.

  * * *

  Preston and Linda rented a house on the outskirts of Alvin that backed up to a bayou. On Saturdays, their two boys, Matt and Brandon, and I stalked the marshy banks catching frogs and hunting crawfish. We’d find their mud chimneys and lure them out with bacon tied to a string, then make them fight one another. The frogs we tied to bottle rockets.

  In late July 1979, a storm blew in that took us by surprise. That day, Mom’s parents arrived from Snyder to stay the weekend, and that’s when it started to rain. By ten o’clock that evening it was still coming down, but even harder. I was lying in bed listening to the wind whip and howl when I heard a loud crash and ran into the living room, where my grandfather was staring out the window. Half the neighbor’s roof had just landed in our front yard, missing his brand-new Chevy Impala by a foot.

  By the next day, Tropical Storm Claudette had dumped forty-three inches of rain on Alvin—the largest twenty-four-hour rainfall ever recorded in the United States. I looked out the window and saw a man rowing a johnboat down our street, loaded with furniture. Luckily our house was on a small hill and was spared.

  Much of Alvin, however, sat under ten feet of water, including Preston’s house. The bayou had jumped its banks and rushed under their doors. Dad waited a day for the water to recede, then waded into the flood to help his brother salvage what was left. But everything they owned was gone, including their family photos and Preston’s letters from Vietnam.

  Earlier that day, Dad had hoisted me onto his shoulders to walk down our street. Dad stood six foot three, and the water was all the way up to his chest, just below my feet. At the end of the block, men were guiding boats between the houses, loading them with coat racks and toasters and other random belongings. A man in a canoe rowed by and shouted something to us, then pointed to the water, where a poisonous cottonmouth slithered past my toes.

  The entire coastal region was paralyzed by flooding, including much of Houston. Yet at the time, it seemed no amount of water could drown the rising totem of the Texas miracle. Midland may have bustled, but Houston was benefiting from the high oil prices more than any other city. As many as a thousand people like us were moving to the region each day to work in the pla
nts and refineries, and to help build the offices and apartments that were shooting up overnight. Office space in Houston was so limited that companies were leasing it eighteen months in advance.

  “This is not a city,” U.S. News & World Report had written the previous year. “It’s a phenomenon—an explosive, churning, roaring juggernaut that’s shattering tradition as it expands outward and upward with an energy that stuns even its residents.”

  The Texas miracle, long before our politicians began throwing it around on campaign stops, started here. Between 1973 and 1981, while the rest of the nation suffocated under double-digit inflation, rising fuel prices, and stagnant growth, and while mills and factories seemed to close each month in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio, Texas added 2.2 million jobs and personal incomes tripled. In just three years between 1979 and 1982, when the country as a whole shed two hundred thousand jobs and $26 million in gross domestic product, Texas hired eight hundred thousand people and boasted a $43 million GDP.

  For the men and women in northern cities ravaged by the recession, who lost work in the plants and factories and watched their communities unravel while crime, addiction, and suicides increased, Texas seemed to be the only working part of America. They looked toward Texas the way John Lewis had nearly a hundred years earlier from the claustrophobic hollow, and the way the sodbusters saw California when the bankers and dusters drove them off the plains.

  Before long, the Texas dream was broadcast on prime time. The television show Dallas premiered in April 1978 and gave us the oilman J. R. Ewing, who embodied the wealth and glamour our nation desired and the greed it would embrace in the coming decade. At the height of Dallas madness—when ninety million people around the world tuned in to see who shot J.R.—the Southfork ranch north of town drew more tourists than the grassy knoll.

  While the Dallas Cowboys were known as America’s Team, the Houston Oilers were the mascots of the Texas miracle. If the boom had a color, it was Columbia blue and white. The Oilers had a derrick on their helmet and a coach who looked like a tool pusher. Bum Phillips was potbellied, wore boots and white cowboy hats, and gnawed on a giant cigar. In 1978, the Oilers drafted the locomotive running back Earl Campbell. Two years later they acquired Kenny “the Snake” Stabler from the Oakland Raiders. Stabler’s long hair and beard made him look like a roadie in Waylon Jennings’s band, and he partied like one too, walking into bars around Houston, yelling, “Strike, lightning!” as if to let everyone know what was in store. Like most people in Alvin, our family burned with Oiler fever. Dad and I wore Snake jerseys and searched the stores for Snake Venom Cola, while Mom had a pair of tight Vanderbilt jeans with “Luv Ya Blue” embroidered on the butt.