Chinaberry Sidewalks (2 page)

The House on Norvic Street

T
he cause for celebration that long-ago New Year’s Eve was my parents’ not-so-fond farewell to the rented house on Avenue P. Not being privy to the news they’d made a down payment on a tidy new four-room bungalow of their own, I was in no mood to indulge in the giddiness of the occasion. But to flash forward fifty years, given what I know of the crippling sense of disentitlement both my parents would struggle with for four and a half decades, getting blotto with a few friends before plunging for the first time into home ownership makes perfect sense. For my mother and father, getting off on the right foot when taking those first few timid steps toward their “golden future,” a concept no less foreign to them than walking on the moon, was a terrifying proposition. To go from a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor to the threshold of some spiffy new cracker-box palace in twelve short years is heady stuff, and just thinking about it almost makes me wish I hadn’t been so hasty in pulling out my father’s gun. As witness to and harvester of my family’s past, I’m mindful of something I once heard about the truth having no greater enemy than wishful rethinking, which in turn reminds me of something I once read on the wall of a truck-stop bathroom: “Just because the past doesn’t seem fucked up in the present doesn’t mean the present wasn’t fucked up in the past.” Amen. The truth then versus the truth now
is
a tricky business. But here the facts remain simple: J.W. and Cauzette, sometime connoisseurs of privation and domestic disturbance, did, if only for a while, overcome the limitations of their beginnings and, with yours truly in tow, head east toward that golden future—six miles east, to be exact.

According to Grandpa Willoughby, failed sharecrop farmer turned twenty-seven-dollar-a-week night watchman for the Port of Houston branch of the Hughes Tool Shipping and Receiving Company, a case can be made that the story of the house on Norvic Street began more than half a century earlier, in 1900, when Galveston was slam-dunked by the deadliest hurricane in recorded history. In the storm’s aftermath, while its survivors pondered the rubble of what had been an up-and-coming international seaport, a team of entrepreneurial Houstonians was busy cajoling the specialfunding branch of the federal government into donating two million dollars for a dredging operation that would convert a series of salt-marsh bayous into the world’s largest man-made shipping lane. When the digging was done, the Houston Ship Channel stretched fifty miles inland from Galveston Bay to the corner of Wayside Drive and Navigation Boulevard, three blocks south of Avenue P. My grandfather put it like this: “After all them people died down there by the gulf, that crew of wildcatters jewed the government out of a shit-pot full of taxpayers’ money and dug ’em a ditch all the way from Galveston up to Wayside Drive. If it weren’t for that bunch, wouldn’t none of us be where we are today.”

The post–World War II housing project where my parents would stake their claim as landed gentry was the brainchild of an over-achieving land developer named Frank Sharp. His vision of a lower-income suburb, easily accessible if barely affordable to the workforce employed by the refineries and chemical plants lining the ship channel like so many poison gas–spewing space stations, sputtered into existence as Industrial Acres. In the early going his project failed to capture the imagination of its intended buyers. But when the war ended, Sharp lowered prices and soon poor fools like my parents were clamoring for any available property.

On a clear day, from the backseat of my father’s Studebaker on Highway 73, the San Jacinto Monument was visible from two miles away. It stood nearly 570 feet tall—alone in the middle of a mosquito-infested swamp twenty miles east of downtown Houston, a giant star crowning its misplaced glory. In 1936, as part of some big wingding celebrating a hundred years of Texas independence, the San Jacinto Battlegrounds—where Sam Houston got the better of Santa Anna in what amounted to a twenty-minute shoving match over who was the rightful owner of this unruly territory—were enshrined in a ceremony dedicating the newly erected monument as a symbol of the Lone Star State’s illustrious heritage. That the heroes of this so-called struggle for independence were alcoholics, opium addicts, and illegal slave traders seems to have been lost on the committee. Then again, in Texas, the immortalization of scoundrels had long been a profitable enterprise, a fact that no doubt weighed heavily in favor of the monument’s construction. Spending four hundred thousand Depression-era dollars on a six-hundred-foot phallus memorializing a pack of thieves literally took the old maxim that everything is bigger in Texas to new heights. My friend Dabbo claimed it looked like somebody giving God the finger.

With the world’s tallest freestanding masonry structure looming in their backyard, civic-minded residents began voicing their disenchantment with the name Industrial Acres and in 1946 banded together to form Jacinto City. Within ten years Frank Sharp’s brainchild was wearing its post-boomtown complacency like a worn-out shoe.

The water tower and rec-hall gym notwithstanding, the Jacinto City of my childhood was a one-story town. Scrub brush stood higher than most rooftops. Dwarfish middle-aged chinaberry trees towered like redwoods on the low-slung horizon. Whether in the whiteout of a high-noon summer sun or the cold gray raindrops of winter, life under these prairie skies had a settling-for-less quality that my parents found reassuring.

In fairness, citizens of Jacinto City in the mid-fifties were, for the most part, solid working-class people. Homes were modestly respectable and well maintained. A splash of landscaping here and an add-on there indicated that a modicum of forward progress still existed in the housing project’s everyday cycles. Not so for the Crowell family. Among the more crippling side effects of my parents’ disentitlement was a dirt-poor sense of themselves that made them far better suited for the maintenance of property not their own—particularly my father, whose mathematical wizardry and carpentry skills emerged only when he was employed by a third party, preferably at below minimum wage. Underfunded, overwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.

The house on Norvic Street was one of a thousand or so cookiecutter bungalows whose poor workmanship, lack of imagination, and cheap materials destined them for an early demise. Considering the six-thousand-dollar price tag, I’m as hard-pressed to imagine where my father came up with the down payment as how he managed the monthly mortgage.

My parents’ little white dream house sat submissively on a forty-by-sixty-foot lot, the extent of its floor plan a living room, a kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom at the end of a six-foot hallway. No frills, no nonsense. Two parallel cement strips, twelve inches in width, led to the one-car garage at the back of the property.

In the transition from Avenue P to Jacinto City, my father managed to wrangle himself a dull-red 1953 Studebaker President, the first in a long string of used-car disasters in which he was unable to align tires and driveway strips with any degree of accuracy. Within a year, the deep ruts that had formed along the edge of the cement made the trip from street to garage as bouncy as a Baja road race. In summer months, when grass grew tall between the strips, he was forced to shrug off wisecracking punks riding past on their bicycles, calling, “Hey, mister, your yard needs a haircut.” I hated them for taunting my father but had to agree our driveway looked like a giant green Mohawk.

The garage stood in the back right-hand corner of the property and was sided with the most easily breakable shingles available in the late forties. Once neighborhood kids discovered the joy of smashing holes in it, the garage’s days were numbered. (I myself was Roy Rogers—holed up in an abandoned mining shack, surrounded by desperadoes and needing to get off a clean shot—when I plunked my first shingle.) Soon after the first few holes appeared at the eye level of a seven-year-old child, my parents threw in the towel. By the end of the decade, all that remained was the roof, the frame, and crumbled white shards scattered in the grass.

The house itself was essentially a tarpaper shack, also with shingle siding. A layer of tarpaper tacked to the two-by-four studs between the exterior shingles and the interior drywall supposedly served the dual purpose of water retardation and insulation. But when you consider that the natural laws governing water damage automatically tripled when you crossed the line into East Houston, leaving four hollow inches inside the walls was less than inspired. It’s unlikely that Mr. Sharp had had planned obsolescence in mind when choosing this design—in fact, using tarpaper to avoid an accumulation of waterlogged asbestos suggests good intentions—but all things being equal, a handful of volunteer Texans stood a better chance of holding off 1,500 Mexicans at the Alamo than a house with a flimsy façade had of surviving the elemental onslaught of southeast Texas weather. In Jacinto City, when the rains came, mailmen needed diving suits.

Baseballs, bicycles, and bad luck didn’t take long to put dents and dings in the outside walls that would expose the house’s interior to its liquid foe. After a few short rainy seasons there was little siding left to dampen the downhill slide my mother and father had been on since the day they moved to Norvic Street.

The house’s roof was a sheet of plywood covered with a layer of tarpaper and a mixture of hot tar and pea gravel spread across the surface and left to dry. Hurricane Carla would soon uncover the flaws in this plan. The living room and my bedroom held together surprisingly well. Had the leaks that began in the kitchen and my parents’ bedroom been swiftly repaired, perhaps they wouldn’t have become indoor waterfalls. My father saw it differently, holding the opinion that a cooking pan and a wash pot—or three cooking pans and a bucket—were a better solution to a leaking roof than needless repair. By the winter of 1962, my parents had to push their bed against the wall nearest the living room and strategically place a number 3 washtub, a five-gallon Igloo water cooler, an ice chest, and various pots and pans to catch the rainwater coming through the ceiling. On a clear night, stars could be seen twinkling through the holes in the roof.

Sheetrock hung from the kitchen ceiling like papier-mâché stalactites. Here, too, the sky was visible. Kelly Smith’s mother had reason to enter the house on Norvic Street but once, and by the way she steeled herself before entering the kitchen you’d have thought it was a leper colony. Her purpose in crossing our dreaded threshold was to hurry up my mother, who was licking and sticking S&H Green Stamps into a book so that I, like Kelly, could snag a tennis racket that I’d never use. Mrs. Smith looked as though she would’ve puked her guts out if she’d taken a second longer to get back outside. My mother was paralyzed with shame.

As the holes in the kitchen ceiling grew bigger, she dispensed with the pots and buckets in favor of just sweeping the rainwater out the back door. She or I would stand there with a broom as it poured down around the overhead light fixture, and it’s only dumb luck that neither of us got electrocuted as we went about our business on these endless rainy days. As the hardwood in my parents’ bedroom floor warped into miniature brown mountain ranges, my father shrugged off the relentless deterioration with a snort. “I like the sound of the rain,” he said. “It makes me sleep better.” Assuming he was telling the truth, he must’ve slept like a dead man, given the bucketfuls that rained down not a foot and a half from his bed.

Summer nights in Jacinto City were an adventure. Evening fell dense as a jungle, and opportunistic insects thrived in hothouse conditions where humidity reigned supreme. Gunshots fired six blocks away would rattle the backyard fence, while eastbound freight trains took their nightly shortcut down the hall and out through the bathroom wall. Past midnight, five houses down, Ruby Gaines would yell, “Got-dammit, H.B., go home and get in the bed,” thus alerting the entire neighborhood that Horace Boudreaux Chenier, the crazy Cajun peeping Tom, was out making his rounds.

How to make it safely through the wicked summer nights was a question that rarely came up among Jacinto City’s sweltering denizens, though how to stay cool was under constant investigation. In a cockeyed stroke of low-cost ingenuity, Frank Sharp’s suburban innovators hit on a brilliant plan to do just that: the attic fan. If there has ever been a more left-footed concept than this—a fan the size of a small, fat airplane propeller wedged into the hallway ceiling and working in reverse, sucking instead of blowing—I’ve yet to encounter it. A switch on the bathroom wall triggered the fan’s slow assimilation of speed until, at full-tilt, the house shook with the rattle and roar of a B-52 bomber.

On paper this might’ve looked like a home run, but its practical application told a different story. Sixty-four straight days at ninety-six degrees and 92 percent humidity revealed the stupidity of inviting the outside indoors. With an attic fan sucking away, window screens had a life expectancy shorter than the Little League baseball season. In my parents’ new house, by mid-July of the second summer, the bedroom screens were a mesh of crumbling rust. As with the holes in the ceiling, my father had neither the money nor the inclination to meet the problem head-on; and once the screens were gone, so was our last line of defense. Without any screens at all, the attic fan brought us face-to-face with one of Mother Nature’s most bothersome creatures.

The Gulf Coast of Texas in 1961 was a breeding ground for mosquitoes more deadly and opportunistic than any others in known existence. That summer, front-page news focused almost entirely on the encephalitis epidemic rampant from Beaumont to Brownsville, and the purveyors of this dreaded disease were feasting on human blood and spreading the sickness around like Confederate money. One bite from the wrong mosquito and the unlucky bastard infected would lapse into a deep coma from which some never awoke. Locally, the condition was known as “the sleepin’ sickness.”