The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic (7 page)
HAUNTED PLACES IN AUSTIN
The most famous place to see dead people, or, using the more politically correct term, Apparition-Americans, is the city's own State Capitol.
The Capitol's oldest ghost is that of Robert Marshall Love, who was the state comptroller early into the twentieth century. He was shot on June 30th, 1903, while at his desk. W. G. Hill, a former employee of the state comptroller's department, shot him, and as Mr. Love lay dying, he said, “I have no idea why he shot me. May the Lord bless him and forgive him. I cannot say more.” His body was later buried at Tehuacana, his hometown. His spirit stayed in the state capitol, where it can be encountered as it wanders the second floor of the east wing during off-hours.
Occasionally it has been reported that he appears to visitors and watches them as they tour the building. Sometimes he speaks, saying “Good day,” but he disappears before a reply can be given. He has even been captured on security camera videotapes, where he is seen standing near the old Comptroller of Public Accounts office. Those who encounter the ghostly Mr. Love report that he is always very polite and well dressed in a business suit that appears to be from the early 1900s. I have never personally seen him, but that could be because I have never actually been inside the State Capitol.
THE DRISKILL HOTEL is another hangout for Austin's Apparition-Americans. It opened its door to the public on December 20, 1886, on a city block purchased by cattle baron Jesse Lincoln Driskill for $7,500. Colonel Driskill (an honorary title given him by the Confederate Army during the Civil War) paid out $400,000 to build the hotel. He hired the best designers of the time, Jasper N. Preston and Sons of Austin, to design the original cream-colored brick and limestone building. The good colonel had busts of himself and his sons, Tobe and Bud, installed around the top of each entrance.
Soon the Driskill became the premier showpiece for the frontier town of Austin, the place to be seen if you were a politician or an aspiring politician. On January 1, 1887, the Driskill hosted its first inaugural ball for newly elected Texas governor Sul Ross. In October 1898, Austin's first long-distance telephone call was placed from the lobby. Less than a hundred years later, former president Lyndon Johnson often watched election returns in the Driskill. The hotel was the headquarters for the media during Johnson's administration. Certainly, history has been made within the walls of this “frontier queen” hostelry. The Driskill has been the meeting place of legislators, lobbyists, and the social leaders of Austin, and was the site of inaugural balls, elaborate banquets, receptions, and university dances and ceremonies. Like its neighbor the State Capitol, the Driskill also has its own ghosts.
Those who have been in the presence of these ghosts say that one of them is certainly Colonel Driskill, who so loved his hotel that he never left. According to Austin Ghost Tours, Driskill announces his presence by the smell of cigar smoke. Unfortunately, this means that Colonel Driskill copped the entrance I had planned to use in my ghostly form. Now, for the sake of originality, I am limited to flatulence or other gas-emitting preambles to announce my presence to the living (or, in my continuing effort to be politically correct, Animated Americans).
An Apparition-American who co-haunts the Driskill with the colonel is the four-year-old daughter of a U.S. senator. The child haunts the grand staircase that goes down to the lobby of the hotel. The story goes that she was playing near the stairs and was killed when she slipped and fell while chasing a ball. The front desk staff has heard her bouncing the ball down the steps and laughing.
More recently, the ghost of the “Houston Bride” has appeared on the fourth floor, hurrying to room 29 in the early morning with her arms full of bags and packages. According to the Austin Ghost Tour, the living woman checked into that room in the early 1990s. Her fiancé had unexpectedly called off their marriage, which left the spurned bride inconsolable. Once settled into her room, she decided that a shopping spree, courtesy of her exfiancé's credit cards, would be just the thing to make her feel better. Three days later, concerned hotel staff investigated her room because she had not been seen since she breezed out of the fourth-floor elevator with her arms filled with bags and packages. Much to the horror of the staff, the Houston Bride was found dead in the bathtub, where she had committed suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. She walks the halls of the fourth floor (but not in a long black veil). Many other ghosts have been seen in the hotel, but the Houston Bride, the ball-chasing four-year-old, and Colonel Driskill are the best known.
Currently, pre-apparitions of the Kinkster himself can be viewed quaffing a Guinness or a few shots of Jameson's, sans bullhorn, at the Driskill bar.
The Texas State Capitol visitor center can be reached at 512-305-8400; for tour information phone 512-463-0063. Visitor parking is available in the parking garage at San Jacinto and Twelfth Street.
The Driskill Hotel is at 604 Brazos Street, phone 800-252-9367 or 512-474-5911.
For Austin Ghost Tours, call the Hideout Theatre at 512-443-3688.
I will end this chapter like we end our livesâin the bone orchard. Here is a guide to Celebrity Gravesites in Austin:
AUSTIN MEMORIAL PARK
2800 Hancock Drive
Austin, TX 78731
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BIBB FALK, COACH AND LAST SURVIVING MEMBER
OF THE 1920 WHITE SOX
Born: January 27, 1899
Died: June 8, 1989
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JAMES A MICHENER, PROLIFIC WRITER
Born: February 3, 1907
Died: October 16, 1997
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ZACHARY SCOTT, ACTOR
Born: February 24, 1914
Died: October 3, 1965
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STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN MEMORIAL
Town Lake
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STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN, MUSICIAN, GUITARIST
Born: October 3, 1954
Died: August 27, 1990
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TEXAS STATE CEMETERY
909 Navasota Street
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STEPHEN F. AUSTIN, THE FATHER OF TEXAS
Born: November 3, 1793
Died: November 27, 1836
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JOHN B. CONNALLY, TEXAS GOVERNOR WOUNDED
IN THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
Born: February 27, 1917
Died: June 15, 1993
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MIRIAM “MA” FERGUSON, FIRST WOMAN
GOVERNOR OF TEXAS AND SECOND WOMAN
GOVERNOR IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
(BY FIFTEEN DAYS)
Born: June 13, 1875
Died: June 25, 1961
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FREDERICK BENJAMIN GIPSON, AUTHOR (WROTE
Old Yeller
AND
Savage Sam
)
Born: February 7, 1908
Died: August 14, 1973
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BARBARA JORDAN, U.S. CONGRESSWOMAN
Born: February 21, 1936
Died: January 17, 1996
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Going Native
VACATIONERS CAN USUALLY BE DIVIDED INTO TWO groups: those who want a Learning Experience and those who want to kick back and do what the locals do. I address this chapter to the latter.
What do Austinites do for fun? Where do they go to buy their books, their music, their fat-free wheat germ? What do Austinites read? What do they listen to? What do they watch? Funny you should ask because I'm fixin' to tell y'all.
Even though the average Austinite seems different from your garden-variety Texan, if you scrape away the angst and look at them carefully under a strong light, you'll find that underneath it all they aren't any different from an East Texan or a West Texan or a North Texan or a South Texan. They're all Texans, and in this state that can only mean one thing. You got a football fan on your hands, pal.
Football is as vital to a Texan as are air and water to anyone else. If our schoolchildren could read as well as they can count by sixes (TOUCHDOWN!), the educational system in Texas would rank higher than a rat's ass, which is about where we are currently. We revolve around the pigskin, make no mistake about it. On Friday nights at your neighborhood high school stadium, there will be as many as fifty thousand people in attendance to watch sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old boys living out the best moments of their lives. After graduation the shine on those golden boys starts to fade and they begin to look forward to growing a crop of boys of their own to carry on the tradition of “hit 'em again,
harder!
” In Texas, every sturdy male worth his mud flaps dreams of the day his son can take the field and get blitzed by another man's son. Hell, the only place in Texas where you can safely pat another man on the ass is the gridiron.
High school football is an animating force here in Texas, whether you want it to be or not. You might not know the difference between a quarterback and a wet-back, but that doesn't matter, football will still affect you. Just try to drive anywhere on a Friday night between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m., and you'll see what I mean. Few things in life are worse then getting bogged down in the testosterone frenzy that is the post-game traffic jam. The best you can do if you find yourself in that predicament is park, let the oversized man-children thunder past, and inhale the musky scent of steroids they leave in their wake.
WHEN THEY AREN'T GOING to football games, Austinites like to celebrate with festivals, but in keeping with its penchant for the weird and eccentric, Austin usually chooses to celebrate weird and eccentric things. Spamarama is an excellent example of a festival that is uniquely Austin.
SPAMARAMA
(The Official Pandemonious Potted Pork Party)
Annual Spam Cook-off, Spamalympics, and SpamJam
www.spamarama.com
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SPAMARAMA, sanctioned by Spam's manufacturer, the Hormel company, is Austin's premier bar party, where the lowly spam loaf takes center stage. The national media loves this festival. CNN first covered it in 1984, giving it international attention. The two founders of SPAMARAMA, Dick Terry and David Arnsberger, thought of the event in 1978 while discussing the sacred Texas tradition, the chili cook-off. Terry mused, “Anyone can cook chili. . . . Now if someone could make Spam edible, that would be a challenge. We ought to have a Spam-off.” And so they did.
First held in 1980, SPAMARAMA has become one of the traditional rites of spring, like Eeyore's Birthday Party or cramming thirty people into a Kia Sportage for a drive to the coast. The Spam cook-off doesn't attract as many competitors as the ubiquitous Barbecue and Chili cook-offs around Texas, but it always did attract a broad cross-section of amateur and professional Spam-slingers from all over the country who come to Austin to compete with such dishes as Spambrosia, Jurassic Pork, and Spama-LamaDingdong (by Spam king “Chef Spam” John Meyers, who has won more SPAMARAMA cook-off trophies than anyone else in the world).
SPAMARAMA has gained a great amount of respect since its inception over twenty years ago. Famed Austin artists Jim Franklin, Micael Priest, Danny Garrett, Sam Yeates, Eddie Canada, and Guy Juke, among others, have created poster art for this porky festival.
Austin American-Statesman
humor columnist John Kelso has written about it; Austin swing band Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel have performed at the SpamJam, as have Alvin Crow, Flaco Jimenez, Greezy Wheels, Austin Lounge Lizards, and Ponty Bone. Past judges have included the likes of Liz Carpenter and various government officials. The Silver Anniversary of SPAMARAMA was in 2003; that year the festival was held at Waterloo Park. Even the Hormel company has begrudgingly given its official okay; it provides the official T-shirts, ball caps, and other Spam memorabilia. In an interview that Dave Arnsberger gave to the
Weekly
Wire
in 2000, he told Margaret Moser, “Every year they [Hormel] try to stop me from doing something else. Last year they complained about the âPork Pull.' Remember when they took Jim Henson to court over the Spam character in that Muppet movie? Hormel spent days in court claiming this, that, and the other. When Henson's lawyer got up, he said they only had two words to say to Hormel: âLighten up.' The judge ruled in favor of Henson.”
EEYORE'S BIRTHDAY PARTY
Pease District Park and Wading Pool
1100 Kingsbury Street
512-448-5160
Last Saturday in April, 11:00 a.m. until dark
Free admission
Â
I like donkeys. I have two and a half donkeys living at my ranch in Texas (the half-donkey is a tiny menace that my friend Angel Spoons nicknamed “Bad Hee-Haw” due to its penchant for biting and kicking its herdmates. Bad Hee-Haw has since reformed and now goes by the name “Little Jewford”). I have never actually been to Eeyore's Birthday Party, but I have always liked the gloomy donkey because of a passage I read in the book when I was a child, which embodied my philosophy of life at the time. It went like this:
“What did you say it was?” he asked.
“Ah!” said Eeyore.
“He's just come,” explained Piglet.
“Ah!” said Eeyore again.
He thought for a long time and then said: “When is he
going?”
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Austin's celebration of Eeyore's Birthday Party began in 1964, when University of Texas student Lloyd W. Birdwell Jr. and his friends decided to honor the arrival of spring as they imagined Christopher Robin might have. Locals and visitors have continued this tradition every spring; the birthday party's activities include maypole dancing, a Hippie Queen pageant, beer, turkey legs, snow cones, and other fare.
Bad Hee-Haw/Little Jewford and I plan to stay at the ranch this year (as every year) because we prefer kicking and biting to maypole dancing and turkey legs. After all, in the words of our friend Eeyore, “One can't complain. I have my friends. Someone spoke to me only yesterday.”
THE TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL
People say that us Texans have a lot of wide-open spaces between our ears, but that doesn't always apply to folks in Austin. We even have our own annual book festival here every November, started by First Librarian Laura Bush back when George W. was governor. Back then he was just thinking of running for president and I was just thinking of having another shot of Jose Cuervo Especial. Today they tell me I'm one of George's favorite writers. Of course, he's not that voracious a reader.
But that was when I first met him. At the book festival.
Authors had come from all over the world, and that night there was a big party given for us by the Bushes at the governor's mansion. I'd had a few drinks and was fairly well walking on my knuckles by the time I got there. I was dressed Texas casual, with black cowboy hat, long black preachin' coat, and brontosaurus-foreskin boots. And, of course, I was smoking a Cuban cigar. I saw Larry McMurtry's name tag in the little basket on the front portico of the governor's mansion. Obviously he hadn't shown up. So I picked up his name tag and slapped it on my preachin' coat.
Austin is widely regarded as the most progressive city in Texas, and that is not an oxymoron. The place was packed with authors, highbrow literary types, and wealthy patrons of the arts. The mansion itself was a perfect locus for this gathering of luminaries, as much of Texas's rich history is reflected upon its walls. Texas, of course, has had some pretty colorful governors, including Pappy Lee O'Daniel, who had a band called the Light Crust Dough-boys. I had a band called the Texas Jewboys. Pappy Lee's campaign slogan was “Pass the biscuits, Pappy!” One of my most requested songs is “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven [and Your Buns in the Bed].” The parallels are uncanny.
You can't list colorful governors without mentioning our first and probably greatest governor, Sam Houston, who was, of course, drunk and sleeping under a bridge with the Indians when they found him and persuaded him to take the office. And then there was George W., whom I hadn't yet met.
It wasn't long before people began coming up to me and saying, “Mr. McMurtry, you have done
so
much for Texas.” They were so sincere that I didn't have the heart to tell them I wasn't Larry McMurtry. So I just shook their hands and smiled and said, “Thank you kindly.” Other people came over and they shook hands with me and they said, “I can't
believe
I'm shaking hands with Larry Mc
Murtry
.” I smiled and said, “Thank you kindly.”
As this situation progressed through the evening, I noticed George W. watching with a certain bemused interest. Finally he came over with a rather quizzical expression on his face. I explained to him that McMurtry was a shy little booger and would never be this outgoing himself, so actually I was giving him some good PR. The governor just chuckled to himself and whispered something to one of his security people. I figured I was being eighty-sixed from the function, and when that didn't happen I went over and asked the security guy what the governor had told him. The security guy looked around furtively, then told me, “The governor said, âI want that guy for my campaign manager.'”
George W. and I have been good friends ever since.
AUSTIN, BEING THE HIGH-TECH university city it is, loves its bookstores. Yeah, we have the corporate chain bookstores here, but why patronize those places when you can go to a local store that has attitude and soul?
BOOKWOMAN
918 West 12th Street (12th and Lamar)
512-472-2785
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There are almost no sure things in life; 100-percent guaranteed usually tallies out to 99.9 percent and that remaining .1 percent is often the killer. There is one sure thing I know of that I can say with 100-percent certainty, and that is this: my song “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven [and Your Buns in the Bed]” has never been played in the BookWoman store, ever. There is not even a .1-percent chance that it has. I think the refrain “You uppity women I don't understand, / Why you gotta go and try to act like a man, / But before you make your weekly visit to the shrink, / You'd better occupy the kitchen, liberate the sink” torpedoes any chance of that happening. I am not offended that this is true. Instead, I find comfort in knowing I have contributed this small piece of certainty to an uncertain world. It brings a level of assurance during these .1-percent times.
That said, the BookWoman bookstore deserves to be supported because it contributes to Austin's unique, independent flavor. Where you spend your dollars does make a difference, so, as the BookWoman proclaims, “Go support your feminist bookstore; she supports you!”
BOOKPEOPLE
603 North Lamar
800-853-9757
Â
In 1970 the edge of the University of Texas was a student slum. From the wasteland of this slum, a haven for readers sprang from the cracks in the concrete like the proverbial rose in Spanish Harlem. At the time the store was called Grok Books. Grok flourished, nurtured lovingly by book lovers.
The store, which later became BookPeople, carries regional titles, as well as small-publisher titles. Their inventory-control staff resides in the store, which means the store knows its clientele and their tastes. Its mission in the world is to fight the homogeneous blight that massive chain bookstores leave in their wake. Here, you decide what you want to read, not some Book of the Month Club cult leader. It is one of the establishments that campaign actively to keep Austin weird.
REMEMBER GOOD OLD MIRABEAU and the settlement of Waterloo? Perhaps fittingly, Waterloo is now the name of what I like to think of as the best record store in the world. And also, perhaps fittingly, it's on Lamar Street. It all makes sense now, doesn't it? Not really.
WATERLOO RECORDS AND VIDEOS
600 A North Lamar Boulevard
512-474-2500
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Waterloo Records has been in Austin for over twenty years. While the store specializes in Texas Music, it has a large and diverse selection of artists from every genre and style, filed all together alphabetically, not by category. This, of course, means that Texas music star Willie Nelson and Las Vegas lounge singer Wayne Newton are filed together in the same neighborhood as Nelly the hip-hop star and boy band N'Sync. That visual experience alone is reason enough to visit Waterloo.