Chinaberry Sidewalks (9 page)

Ever the good host, my mother obliged with as violent a seizure as any I’d seen. When she began to convulse, Sister Shook launched a well-rehearsed tirade of prayer into which the other witches fell effortlessly in step, like schoolgirls in a jump-rope line.

Oblivious to Sister Crowell’s condition, these bitches turned the intensity of their exorcism to full blast. Writhing on the floor, my mother ground her teeth and frothed like a rabid dog, her bones bending in directions physically impossible without breaking. In fairness to the prayer witches, she did look like someone possessed by the Devil.

“Spit him out! Spit him out!” Sister Shook screamed as this psychic storm raged in our living room.

Torn between seeing the Devil walking around our living room or watching my mother die, I threw my lot in with the prayer witches. If she did spit the Devil out, she might have a chance of surviving the ordeal, so I fell wholeheartedly into their chant. “Spit him out! Spit him out! In the name of
God
, spit him out!” we roared in unison, like crazed football fans.

I can’t imagine what the neighbors might’ve thought was going on inside our house, but surely six old women and an eight-year-old boy shouting at a thirty-five-year-old woman in the throes of a grand mal seizure to spit out the Devil must sound like insanity with a bullhorn.

The madness reached its crescendo when my mother actually did start to spit. At first the froth from the corners of her mouth was all she could muster. Then, like the first drops of a cloudburst, a few small gobs fell to the living room floor—until suddenly she began coughing up waves of slobber. And right before my eyes, Satan took shape in a puddle of spit.

The prayer witches went on rebuking the ever-expanding pool. When she could spit no more, the seizure drew itself to a close, and both my mother and Satan lay exhausted on the floor. Satisfied at last, the six old biddies abruptly led my semiconscious mother to the kitchen for a victory cup of coffee. Sister Shook nodded at the pool of spit on the floor and ordered me to clean it up.

Of all the things I’d done in my short life, whether by happenstance or direct order, wiping the Devil off the living room floor was the task for which I was least prepared. I was better suited for getting swallowed by a whale or murdered by a drifter than I was for this line of work.

A more resourceful child might have politely informed the old hag that she was welcome to clean up her own damn mess—I can easily imagine Dabbo pointing out that his ass was hers to kiss whenever she was ready—but on this day such charming irrepressibility wasn’t mine to flaunt. Instead I put on my father’s cowboy boots (their tops so tall that Satan couldn’t bite me on the leg), flung a towel over the pool of spit, mopped the floor clean with an outstretched foot, and, taking every precaution not to get close enough that the Devil could jump in my mouth, speared the dreaded bugger with the end of the broom handle and sprinted for the front door. Hightailing it down the alley with Sister Crowell’s banished tormentor flapping in the breeze, I spied Buddy Abel’s back fence—the highest one there—and, without noticing his mother was hanging clothes on the line, hurled the Prince of Darkness to within three feet of her laundry basket. “Whoops, I’m sorry, Mrs. Abel,” I yelped. “It was an accident. My flag came off while I was whirling it around.”
No, please don’t pick it
—Needless to say she picked it up. “Oh, that’s all right. Just throw it back over and I’ll take care of it.” Truth be told, I was hoping the Devil
would
get inside this mean neighbor who talked down to my mother.

Suddenly I remembered the culvert at the end of the sidewalk and bolted for it as fast as my skinny legs would allow. Flying past Mrs. Boyer, who for the first time in ages didn’t call out for me to stop what I was doing and perform some piddling chore her granddaughters easily could’ve done but rarely did, I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Mrs. Boyer, just practicing a little jousting.” A man loitering around the culvert told me not to throw the towel down the drain, that it would cause flooding and he’d write my parents a pretty steep citation. I was on the verge of telling him I had reason to believe this was Satan we were talking about, that there was every possibility he was about to enter my body, when something caught my eye. Sitting there fenceless on the corner, Billy Duncan’s house offered exactly what I’d been looking for: an exposed crawl space in the back where his father kept an old-fashioned push mower that, openly visible to passersby, could as easily been stolen as put to good use. Promising the man that my friends and I always paid close attention to what we threw in the sewer system, I tromped off in my father’s boots and hid behind the Cheniers’ chinaberry tree until he cranked up his truck and drove away. Two minutes later, with Satan resting as far underneath the Duncans’ house as I could sling him, the job was complete.
Good-bye, you old Devil, now you live under Billy Duncan’s house. Momma’s gonna need a new broom
.

I arrived back home to find the prayer witches taking leave of my mother.
Good riddance, you self-righteous old bats
, was my verdict
. I can take care of Momma better than all of you put together. Besides, y’all are butt-ugly
. Before the car pulled away, I was washing my hands for the first time in my life without being told.

Christian’s Drive-In

P
ublic dining was a matter of considerable complexity for my parents. On their list of priorities, vein-clogging greasiness ran a distant second to the avoidance of crippling self-consciousness brought on by the harsh demands associated with being seated in a restaurant. Luckily, two drive-in eateries on the east side of Houston, Prince’s on Wayside Drive and Christian’s on Market Street, were, by design, indifferent to my parents’ inability to grasp simple etiquette. Specializing in hamburgers, gulf shrimp, chicken livers, French fries, and soggy onion rings—all of it fried fast, served fast, and eaten even faster in the comfort of your own automobile—both establishments catered to their social inadequacies. And the price was right. Dinner for three for less than five dollars gave a man making $1.65 an hour a shot at a little high living now and then. My preference, though, were the concession stands at the Little League ballpark and the Market Street Drive-In Theater, corn dogs, snow cones, popcorn, cherry Cokes, and slowpoke suckers being more to my liking than burgers and fries.

My mother had no interest in the culinary arts, but she did have a knack for producing edible meals when there was nothing to be found in either the pantry or the refrigerator. Frying eggs in an aluminum pie pan on an electric iron, when unpaid gas bills prevented cooking on the stove, is one example. Roasting squirrel meat marshmallow-style over a junk-pile fire in the backyard is another; squirrel, however, is an acquired taste, and I could never get past the salt-and-crude-oil tang that defined its gamy flavor, even smothered in what my mother called grease gravy.

The main ingredient in her short-order repertoire was the ubiquitous can of recycled Crisco she kept on the stovetop. Her basic theory on cooking was this: If it’s edible, fry it. Chicken, corn, sauerkraut, Spam, Vienna sausages, hot dogs, liver, dove, venison, potted meat, frog legs, catfish, frozen okra, mountain oysters (bull testicles)—you name it, she fried it.

My tenth birthday fell on payday Friday, automatically tripling the chances my father would come home sloshed. Thanks to a booming payroll-check subculture, East Houston was a breeding ground for small businesses known as icehouses. Left over from the days before refrigeration—when block ice was delivered door-to-door, first by horse-drawn wagons and later by truck—icehouses had evolved into operations that transformed paychecks into cold beer in one smooth transaction. My father’s natural aversion to the banking system and his construction-worker’s thirst made him a perfect customer. Arriving home drunk on Fridays was something he did with great regularity—sometimes playful, sometimes dark and dangerous. On this particular Friday, I could tell by the sound of the Studebaker wheeling in wide of the driveway strips that his mind wasn’t on my birthday.

Whenever my father drank, his face and ears turned a deep shade of crimson. In a good mood, this accentuated his comical nature; when he was seething, he made spontaneous human combustion seem as cool and refreshing as ice fishing in Minnesota. The most accurate barometer of his mood were his eyes: happy drunk, they were clear-blue sunshine; pissed-off drunk, the color of muzzle fire from his pump-action 16-gauge. On my tenth birthday it was the latter, shot through with the white fire of anger mixed with payday beer and a half pint of Old Crow whiskey.

“Hi, Dad.”

“I thought I told you to pick up all this shit outta the yard.”

The shit consisted of my bicycle, lying on its side, and four cardboard squares we used as bases during morning and evening ball games. “There ain’t nothin’ to pick up.”

“There is, by God, I’m looking right at it. You ain’t blind.”

“Those are our bases.”

“I said clear this shit up.”

“We got a game in the morning.”

“Y’all are wearin’ out my damn grass.”

“What do you care? You never mow it. We’re just doing you a favor keepin’ it all wore down.”

“Boy, you go gettin’ smart with me and I’ll give you somethin’ to get smart about.”

“The chinch bugs do worse than what we do.”

“You ain’t too big for me to wear your ass out.”

“You don’t even know it’s my birthday.”

As pissed-off drunk as he was, his true nature surfaced, if only for an instant, and a glimmer of sweetness sobered him a little. “Naw, I didn’t forget your birthday. Hell, it’s three days after mine!”

With a halt called in our battle of wills, we were both suddenly awkward and at a loss for words. In danger of having our soft underbellies exposed, he and I shifted our weight from one foot to the other while the world around us settled into a deepening silence. The question of what to do next was answered when my mother stepped out of the house and cheerfully suggested we go to Christian’s for a birthday celebration.

Gene Christian, owner and chief fry cook, was a robust man whose foppish, perfectly atilt chef’s hat, waxed moustache, and starched white outfit gave him a Salvador Dalí look. He relished putting his booming baritone on public display when announcing Little League games from the green plywood press box my father had built courtesy of his generous cash donations.

Mr. Christian made the most of his drive-in’s prime location. Seventy-five feet of red and white awning, in front of the little wooden shack he’d converted into the guts of his operation, was hard to miss. An oyster-shell parking lot served to alert his carhops to new arrivals, the hum of V8s and the crunch of shells beneath whitewall tires announcing a booming business.

The best jukebox in the world sat on bottle crates against the front wall of Mr. Christian’s spruced-up little shack, and he kept it loaded with 45s by Santo & Johnny, Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo, Elvis Presley, Cookie and the Cupcakes, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, C. L. Weldon, and Jimmy Reed. It was on that jukebox I first heard Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” and Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk.” Today, when I hear Bruce Channel’s version of “Hey! Baby,” I see the bright red and yellow CHICKEN LIVERS, 99 CENTS sign in Mr. Christian’s window. Rhythm and blues and humidity is nature at its best.

Any illusions I had about a birthday celebration evaporated about as quickly as the half pint of I. W. Harper my father polished off while my mother put on a clean pair of pedal pushers and a ship-to-shore blouse.

In the interest of maintaining her Christian self-image, my mother chose righteous indignation when it came to alcohol and loose women. When I pointed out the hypocrisy of denigrating “floozies” when she herself was known to chug beer occasionally, she adamantly refused to acknowledge that guzzling a six-pack of Jax for the purpose of knocking herself unconscious before the onset of a grand mal seizure could possibly be construed as licentious behavior. She viewed her drinking as self-defense. But whether it was for numbing the effects of epilepsy or joining her husband in escaping a tedious existence, the results were never pretty.

When our little birthday party in the red Studebaker rolled up under Mr. Christian’s awning and my mother ordered a can of Jax to go along with her onion rings and fried chicken gizzards, I knew trouble wasn’t far behind. The can she knocked back in the few minutes it took for our food to arrive and the two she killed by the time she finished eating suggested that she was going toe-to-toe with my father.

The jukebox might have been malfunctioning, but I’d rather think some blues-crazed customer in love with the new Jimmy Reed record kept playing it over and over again simply because it felt so good. In a voice half-slur and half-whine, poor Jimmy complained relentlessly about how some woman was treating him like shit.

Got me runnin’, got me hidin’

Got me run, hide, hide, run anyway you want to let it roll

Yeah, yeah, yeah
,

You got me doin’ what you want me

So baby why you want to let go?

As confused as Jimmy was about what his baby wanted him to do, I was twice as confused about what to do if my mother kept chugging beer.

I loved Jimmy Reed. To me his records sounded like grown-up sex: hypnotic, erotic, exotic, and, after twenty-five straight plays, psychotic. That’s how “Baby What You Want Me to Do” sounded that night, demanding that I pay attention to its every nuance. More than anything I wanted to relax and listen to the song, but all hell was breaking loose inside the car.

Going toe-to-toe with my father did not involve standing up to him with the resolve of a wise and powerful woman. No, she favored the spineless, pathetic approach. Slurring her words even more than Jimmy Reed, she said, “I know you hate me. You’ve hated me since the day you met me. I’m a cripple. I have convulsions and you cain’t stand me for it,” lines that were tailor-made to tweak my father’s revulsion. “J. W. Crowell, if you was any kind of man, you’d come out and say how much you hate me. Your own son knows you do.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about nobody hatin’ nobody,” I said. “Y’all leave me out of it.” This wasn’t quite true: I hated my mother’s willingness to be a doormat, for inviting my father to step on her, and hated him for accepting the invitation.

Goin’ up, goin’ down

Goin’ up, down, down, up, anyway you want to let it roll

Yeah, yeah, yeah

You got me doin’ what you want me

So baby why you want to let go?

While Jimmy kept trying to figure it out, my mother danced like a mongoose around the coiled cobra of my father’s temper.

“I know you been screwin’ Jackie Winston, and I know you got a son walkin’ the streets of Houston right now without your name.”

“That’s enough, Cauzette. You don’t know when to shut up.”

“You shut me up a long time ago when you said, ‘I do.’ Don’t you think I know you’ll screw anything that walks?”

Got me peepin’, got me hidin’

Got me peep, hide, hide, peep, anyway you want to let it roll

Biting her fingernails was a habit my mother indulged to the hilt. “It’s my nerves,” she claimed, and she took nervousness to new heights—“down to the quick,” as she put it—until her fingertips were a throbbing bloodred pulp. Considering this, it’s hard to imagine how she could produce claw marks on the side of my father’s face. But I saw it happen as Jimmy wailed on.

The time bomb suddenly exploded. My father punched her in the face, hard. Unfazed, she kept scratching away at his face and screaming, “Go on and hit me. Show everybody what a big man you are. Go on, knock my teeth out. I know you hate the ground I walk on.”

These were eight-year-olds in drunken thirty-something bodies powered by pent-up rage. If experience had taught me anything, it was how to defend myself from their periodic need to hurl themselves into the inferno. But in the cramped quarters of the Studebaker, the flames were dangerously close to torching my self-preservation. Survival, from my vantage point in the backseat, was fast becoming an issue.

In my parents’ world of downward spirals, outside influences—like the carload of customers parked next to us, or concerned carhops asking if everything was all right—were less effectual than a kite in a hurricane. Quelling these prizefights called for more drastic measures.

Clarity came from a familiar source inside my head.
If you want this to stop, get their attention
. It occurred to me the Dr Pepper bottle in my hand could end this brawl once and for all.

“Look what you made me do!” I yelled above the din of their vitriol, and was surprised when the fighting stopped instantly and both my parents granted me a haggard glance. Then, with the stage set, I busted myself over the head with the bottle, opening a three-inch gash just above my hairline.

I got the full cartoon effect. It felt as if I’d split my skull into two pieces. I saw stars. Drunken birds tweeted, chirped, and crash-landed on the seat next to me. Guardian angels swooped down for a closer look, winced, and sped off in search of scraped knees or bumblebee stings. Jimmy Reed’s harmonica sounded like an ambulance somewhere across town promising to drop by and check on me when it got a chance.

When my brain began to unscramble, the images of my mother and father—jaws resting on their breastbones, their faces the color of a Ku Klux Klan sheet, their eyes lobbying for confirmation that indeed I’d just coldcocked myself with an empty soda bottle—came into focus. My whacking myself on the head had successfully halted their madness, and their shocked sobriety and my nauseated wooze left us in a three-way trance. The scene is like a Polaroid photograph that I view from the inside out.

Right before, Mr. Christian had been leaning in the driver’s side window, thinking that by taking the humorous approach he might break up the fracas. I’m pretty sure I heard him say, “Whoa, there. I reckon y’all didn’t hear the bell. The judges scored it a draw.”

When he heard and saw the bottle bounce off my noggin, he jerked my father’s door open, yanked him out of the car, and retrieved me from the back.

I’d regained my bearings enough to know that, despite my bloody forehead, no real damage had been done, but to be on the safe side I decided to pitch a crying conniption—my best hope of keeping my parents’ attention turned away from the dog-and-cat fight I felt sure they couldn’t wait to jump back into.

Mr. Christian’s ballpark voice boomed, “Now, son, you be still and let me see if any of your brain’s leaking out with all that blood.” He pulled my scalp wound apart with his huge thumbs and pronounced me fit to fight another day.

Having regained his senses, sobered and sheepish, my father made a hollow stab at re-establishing himself as a capable citizen and father. “It’s all right now, Gene. I can take care of this.”

Mr. Christian growled, “J.W., I always thought you was a pretty good ole boy and a good customer. But I’m telling you right now, if I ever catch you beatin’ up that boy’s momma again, there won’t be enough left of you to haul off with the garbage.”