All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas, and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to his home state, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.
Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He’s a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he’s beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie’s Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie’s bus over and “discover” his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.
In 2016, I went to Willie’s annual Fourth of July picnic. Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player, invited me on the bus (there are actually three of them in Willie’s entourage; this one was weed free). As Willie has gotten older and even more physically diminished, there’s an existential quality to his performances. Nearly all of his contemporaries are gone. During performances, Willie stands alone in front, with Mickey a couple of steps behind his left shoulder, providing a kind of harmonic commentary. It’s a conversation that has been going on a long time. “This is my forty-third picnic,” Mickey told me.
As he was showing me around the bus, Mickey pulled back the drape on his closet. “You’ll want to see this,” he said, pulling out a gray guitar case. Inside was Trigger, the acoustic guitar that Willie named after Roy Rogers’s beautiful horse. It is perhaps the most famous musical instrument in America, rivaled only by Lucille, B. B. King’s black Gibson, although there have been many Lucilles and only one Trigger. “Here,” Mickey said, handing it to me.
Trigger is really light. It has a big hole near the bridge, worn through by Willie’s pinky and ring fingers. Pick marks have scored the face paper thin. The entire instrument feels sheer, the frets worn down to nearly nothing. It’s been signed many times—Leon Russell used a pocketknife—but the signatures are fading into the patina. If you saw this guitar at a garage sale, you would walk on by. And yet Trigger has somehow maintained its distinctive mellow voice, a sound Willie thought resembled that of his hero, Django Reinhardt, although to me it sounds like Willie himself, twangy and full of character.
I’m in a group that puts up statues in Austin, and our most recent work was a bronze Willie, holding Trigger, that now graces the entry to the Austin City Limits studio. I got to pose for that statue, holding a Martin guitar of the same model, N-20. Clete Shields, of Philadelphia, was our sculptor. In 2011, when the statue was cast and delivered to Austin, we covered it with a parachute and stored it in a movie studio until it could be installed. One night, Willie came by for a private unveiling. He was gracious but a little overwhelmed as he exchanged a long look with himself. Bill Wittliff, who is on our committee, explained that what we liked about this piece was its engagement with the audience. “People will come to you,” he said. “Little children will touch your knee and seek your counsel.”
“Do what I say and not what I do,” Willie advised.
We kept the statue in the studio for months, but we couldn’t seem to get Willie to agree on a date for the public unveiling. He was being modest or embarrassed or coy—we couldn’t decide which. Finally, he allowed that he might be free on April 20, 2012. The date didn’t mean anything to me, but Marcia Ball, another member of our committee, guffawed. “Four-twenty,” she said. “You know what that is? It’s National Marijuana Day.”
So we unveiled the statue at 4:20 p.m. on April 20. Willie stood in front of his giant likeness and sang “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”
* * *
WE NOW LIVE in a neighborhood called Tarrytown. Steve’s house is just around the corner. We’re in a forest of cedar elms, so it’s shadier than most parts of town—always a consideration in Texas. When we first looked at the house, which is two stories and faced in yellow brick, it was late winter and the robins were churning through the berry bushes on the back fence, getting a little drunk. There was a lot of work to be done, but the house was sturdy, and I was sure I could feel at home here. I persuaded the bank I could afford the mortgage. I had sold a movie that Oliver Stone was going to direct. He had already cast Al Pacino in the lead role.
A week after we closed on the house, Oliver called me. “Larry, I had a bad dream last night,” he said in his satanic whisper.
No movie.
I never learned exactly what happened. But I now owned a house way beyond my means. One lesson Hollywood teaches you is this: don’t buy the house until you’ve eaten the popcorn. Still, I was trapped in one of those periodic episodes of lusting after wealth and fame.
When the lady across the street moved to New York, her house stayed vacant for three months, with a For Rent sign in front. One day, Roberta asked a neighbor to help jump-start our car. She had noticed that the rent sign was down, so she asked our neighbor if the house had been rented. “Yeah!” he said. “To a movie star!”
“Really? Who?”
“I think his name is Mark McDonald, or something like that. They say he’s real handsome.”
Roberta thought for a moment, then guessed, “Matthew McConaughey?”
“That’s the one!”
She had seen some guy drive up in a big white van, wearing a cutoff sweatshirt. She almost took offense at the cheeky look he cast in her direction. Soon we began seeing him out in the yard, landscaping, usually with his shirt off, which attracted the attention of just about everybody. This was a few years before People magazine named him the “Sexiest Man Alive.”
The house is a little gray one-story bungalow, the kind of place that, if it were suddenly torn down, you wouldn’t remember what it looked like. Matthew labored to make it more attractive, putting in some sago palms and even some lights under the trees. He was certainly the world’s best tenant. Within a few weeks, he knew everybody on the block. We understood that his presence among us was a kind of secret.
The world seemed out of balance. Matthew was by now a multimillionaire, his face was all over the newsstands—anything I might have envied in terms of money and fame he had in abundance. And yet there he was, mowing the yard of a modest little rent house in Tarrytown. He was from Uvalde, west of San Antonio, about an hour’s drive from Mexico. He had gone to the University of Texas and was a big Longhorns fan. He got his break in the movie business in Dazed and Confused, by Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater. So there were many ties. But if he wanted to come back to Austin to live, there were much grander residences to consider—for instance, the house I couldn’t afford.
It finally occurred to me that what Matthew wanted was what I already had: a quiet existence on a pretty street, with nice neighbors and a degree of anonymity that was hard to come by for a face as recognizable as his. He wanted to somehow return to ordinary life. And I wanted to escape it.
On a Saturday afternoon before the UT-Baylor football game, Matthew invited the neighbors over for a cookout. He and Roberta talked about the team. She is not a real sports fan, but she had gotten a bit of a crush on the UT quarterback, Major Applewhite, a scrappy, undersized redhead who led many memorable fourth-quarter comebacks (he’s now the head coach at the University of Houston). Matthew was well known for hanging out with the players, so I teased Roberta by saying that he had met Major Applewhite. Roberta’s jaw dropped. “You know Major Applewhite?” she exclaimed. Matthew burst into laughter. I think at that mom
ent he must have felt that he had really done it; he had achieved ordinary life.
One autumn night in 1999, around three a.m., I was awakened by the sound of loud talking and dogs barking. I tried to go back to sleep, but I heard car doors shutting, more barking, and then the instantly recognizable sound of a police scanner. I jumped up and pulled back the shade. There were four police cruisers in front of our house.
“Roberta!” I said. “Something’s going down!”
There was a cop standing in my yard when I came out. “Sir, do you live here?” he asked.
I nodded. “What’s going on?”
“We made an arrest at that house,” he said, indicating Matthew’s bungalow. Then he asked if I knew the person who lived there.
“Yes, it’s Matthew McConaughey. Is that who you arrested?”
The cop told me that Matthew was being charged with being “disorderly” and having a small amount of narcotics. I noticed Matthew in the back of one of the cruisers. “Can I talk to him?” I asked.
“No, he’s in a stupor,” the cop said.
He didn’t look like he was in a stupor to me. He was spitting mad.
“Someone in the neighborhood called in a complaint,” the cop said. “Actually, they called twice. He was disturbing the peace.”
“You’re the ones who woke me up,” I said.
The cop was clearly morose. “The females in my family think he’s the greatest guy,” he said. He added that the cop who made the arrest hadn’t known who Matthew was. That was the reason for the squad-car convention. An unmarked car pulled up and all the cops went into a huddle. They wound up taking Matthew downtown. “We’re going to low-profile it,” the cop assured me.
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
The news broke around noon. The story was that Matthew had been dancing around in the back of his house, naked, playing the bongos. Apparently he had left his back door open and annoyed a neighbor across the fence. When the cops arrived, they had spotted what they thought was a bong, so it turned into a drug bust. The cops burst into his den, and when Matthew yelled at them, they cuffed him. Then they swept up a bunch of his belongings in black trash bags—for “evidence.” As it turned out, there were no drugs.
Everybody in town was on Matthew’s side. Even Laura Bush confided at a party the next day that she was shocked at how the cops had behaved—entering a person’s house without permission and no warrant.
By that time there were TV trucks stationed in front of our house. The tabloid press was all over the story. It was galling to see how the press behaves around celebrity news; that’s one reason people hate reporters, even though this is exactly the kind of news they love to consume. The local paper committed the unpardonable sin of publishing Matthew’s address, and after that our little street became a promenade of mothers pushing strollers and teenagers knocking on Matthew’s door at all hours. Someone drove a nail into a tire on his van. The drug charges were dropped, but he paid a $50 fine for disturbing the peace. His fantasy of slipping back into ordinary life was punctured. The bongo incident “ruined it for me,” he confided on the morning he packed his furniture in a moving van. He could never feel safe here again.
I talked to Steve about Matthew’s broken dream of a normal existence. Steve was sympathetic, but he observed that movie stars like Matthew cultivate celebrity and can’t expect to escape notoriety. In any case, “he’s not a ‘normal’ person,” Steve said. “He’s a wild man living in Tarrytown.”
* * *
DONALD TRUMP’S UNEXPECTED VICTORY marked a cultural turning point all over America. There were protests around the country, including in Austin, where on the Sunday after the election about 150 people gathered on the capitol steps and marched south down Congress Avenue. A small group of Trump supporters staged a counterprotest. According to the news reports, one man was especially conspicuous: Joseph Weidknecht, a laid-off sheet-metal worker, who stands six feet six and weighs 350 pounds. He was wearing a Make America Great Again gimme cap and carried a sign, “Proud to Be Deplorable”—a reference to Hillary Clinton’s derogatory remark about Trump supporters. A number of the anti-Trump marchers, some wearing Guy Fawkes masks, began to mock him. They ripped the sign out of his hands and grabbed the hat off his head, then tried to set his shirt on fire. “I can handle myself in a brawl,” Weidknecht later said, “but when they brought out the lighters, I was genuinely scared for my life.”
Suddenly, a small woman wearing a hijab forced herself between Weidknecht and the people who were assaulting him. Amina Abdeen, a nineteen-year-old student at UT, had immigrated to the United States from Iraq when she was ten. “She stood there like a mountain, trying to stop the violence,” Weidknecht said.
“I do not stand for what he stands for,” Abdeen remarked after the police had arrived and arrested six of the protestors. “But I know his fears and concerns are valid. I love this country so much, and I don’t like what I see coming.”
As the new administration was attempting to block Muslims from entering the United States, anti-immigrant posters started appearing on campus buildings. “Imagine a Muslim-Free America,” one said. A mosque was firebombed in Victoria in South Texas. Sid Miller, the boisterous agricultural commissioner, told the BBC that he worried about America becoming a Muslim country. (Muslims account for about one percent of the U.S. population.) He previously advocated dropping nuclear bombs on the Muslim world.
One of Roberta’s close friends is a writer who is married to a professor. They are Jewish. They have a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard. As Senate Bill 4—targeting “sanctuary cities”—was being debated at the capitol, an unsigned letter was slipped under their front door, threatening the lives of their children, by name. “Is this Austin?” Roberta cried.
TEN
More Sausage
Texas is the nation’s largest red state, with 38 electoral votes, which will likely increase to 41 or 42 after the next census. (California has 55 electoral votes, but it hasn’t increased that number since 2003. New York has 29, but that number has been declining for decades.) If Texas went blue, there would be a Democratic electoral lock on the presidency. Republican margins of victory within the state have been shrinking for years, and the demographics suggest that Texas should already be in the blue column. It’s a young, urban state with a majority of minority citizens. It should be as reliably blue as California; instead, it is the Red Planet in the political universe.
The only real election in Texas is the Republican primary, where normally about 1.5 million voters turn out. If you win 750,001 primary votes in a state of 27 million people, you can become governor or a U.S. senator. In 2012, Ted Cruz got the nomination with only 631,000 votes in a runoff. This happened despite the fact that he is such an un-Texan political figure—a Princeton and Harvard man, who in another era would have fit comfortably with British imperialists in their grand club rooms, perhaps sporting a moustache and a monocle. The fact that Cruz didn’t cancel his Canadian passport until 2014 suggested to me that he was hedging his bets, culturally speaking.
There was hope for the Democrats, in 2014, that Wendy Davis—a glamorous blonde who captured national attention through her eleven-hour filibuster to block a bill banning abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy—would be the champion that Texas Democrats needed if they were to regain the statehouse, but she lost in a landslide to Greg Abbott. She even lost the women’s vote.
The 2016 presidential season promised to have a Texas stamp on it, with Perry and Cruz in the primary, along with Jeb Bush and Rand Paul, both of whom grew up in the state, and Carly Fiorina, who was born in Austin. They all washed out. Then, in early September, while the race between Trump and Clinton was tightening nationally, a Washington Post–SurveyMonkey poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead in Texas by one point. Other polls showed Trump very narrowly ahead. This in a state that Mitt Romney carried in 2012 by 16 points.
Texans were wrought up. A mother in a Houston suburb kicked her seven-year-old son out of the house when he cast the wrong vote in a mock election at his school. She actually made a video of the scene. “Bye, Donald Trump lover,” she says, as she forces the hysterical child out of the house with a suitcase and a sign: “My mom kicked me out because I voted for Donald Trump.” The mother later claimed it was a joke, but the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services opened an investigation. There was a telling obituary in the Houston Chronicle that read: “Elene Meyer Davis was born in Yoakum, Texas on the 7th of October 1924, and died on the 7th of June 2016, of complications due to congestive heart failure and the 2016 Presidential campaign.”
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