Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  The Zanesville syndicate looked at all the best natural qualities of the country and decided to attribute them to Odessa whether they were there or not. Through brochures and pamphlets it conjured up a place with weather as wonderful as Southern California’s and soil as fertile as that of the finest acre of farmland in Kansas or Iowa.

  “Splendid cities will spring up all along the railroads that traverse the plains, and immense fortunes will be made there in a few years, in land business ventures, you will see the most remarkable emigration to that section that has occurred since the days when the discovery of gold sent wealth-seekers by thousands into Colorado,” Henry Thatcher boldly forecast in the Chillicothe Leader in 1886.

  If that wasn’t enough to make someone leave southern Ohio, Odessa was also promoted as a Utopian health spa with a $12,000 college and a public library, and a ban on alcohol. Those suffering from consumption, bronchitis, malaria, kidney, bladder, or prostate problems, asthma, or rheumatism would be welcomed with open arms, according to a promotional pamphlet.

  Those who were failures, near death, didn’t like working, bad with money, or cheap politicians were specifically not welcome, the same pamphlet said. The statement appeared to exclude many of the people who might have been interested in such a place.

  The great Odessa land auction took place on May 19, 1886. The Zanesville boys, careful to the last drop, actually held it 350 miles to the east, in Dallas. Historical accounts of Odessa do not accurately indicate how many settlers bought lots. But about ten families, German Methodists from western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh, hoping to realize the Utopian community so grandly talked about, did arrive.

  They tried to fit in with the ranchers and cowboys who were already there, but it was not a good match. The Methodists found the ranchers and the cowboys beyond saving. The ranchers and the cowboys found that the Methodists did nothing but yell at them all the time.

  As part of its commitment, the syndicate went ahead and built a college for the Methodists. It was constructed around 1889 but burned mysteriously three years later. Some said the college was set afire by cowboys who disliked being told by the Methodists that they could not drink, particularly in a place that cried out daily for alcohol. Others said it was burned by a contingent of jealous citizens from Midland because the Odessa college was competing with a similar institution that the sister city had built. Finally, there were those who said the college was burned down simply because it was something the damn Yankees had built the natives of the city when no one had asked for it. Given the later attitudes of Odessa, all these theories are probably true. A hospital was also built, but most settlers ignored it and instead relied on such tried-and-true home remedies as cactus juice and a wrap of cabbage leaves for the chills, a plaster made out of fresh cow manure for sprains, and buzzard grease for measles.

  Contrary to all the boasts of the land’s fertility, it was virtually impossible to farm anything because of the difficulty of getting water. Instead, Odessa eked out a living from the livestock trade, all dreams of Utopia gone forever when the town’s first sheriff, Elias Dawson, decided that the ban on alcohol constituted cruel and unusual punishment and became the proprietor, along with his brother, of the town’s first saloon.

  The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a “chinaman,” refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman.

  For more casual entertainment, a couple of cowboys gathered up all the cats they could find one day, tied sacks of dried beans to their tails, and then set them loose downtown to scare the daylights out of the horses and the citizens milling about. In later times it was hard not to get caught up in the frivolity of those great practical jokers, the Wilson brothers, whose professional standing as doctors didn’t mean they were above grabbing unsuspecting towns-folk into the barbershop and shaving their heads.

  By 1900, Odessa had only 381 residents. By 1910 the population had increased to 1,178. Most of those inhabitants depended on ranching, but various droughts made survival almost impossible because of the lack of grazing land for cattle. The ranchers became so poor they could not afford to buy feed, and many cattle were just rounded up and shot to death so the stronger ones could have what little grass was left.

  Nothing about living in Odessa was easy. Finding a scrubby tree that could barely serve as a Christmas tree took two days. Even dealings with cattle rustlers and horse thieves had to be compromised; they were shot instead of hanged because there weren’t any trees tall enough from which to let them swing.

  A flu epidemic hit in 1919, filling up the only funeral home in town, which was part of the hardware store. It so severely overran the town that there weren’t enough men well enough to dig the graves of those who had died. Medical care was at best a kind of potluck affair. The one doctor who settled in Odessa during this period, Emmet V. Headlee, used the dining room of his home as an operating room. He performed the operations while his wife administered the anesthetic.

  By 1920 the population had dropped back down to 760, and it was hard to believe that Odessa would survive. But ironically, the Zanesville elite was right in its fanciful prediction that Odessa was bubbling with a bounty of riches.

  Unknown to anyone when it was founded, the town was sitting in the midst of the Permian Basin, a geologic formation so lush it would ultimately produce roughly 20 percent of the nation’s oil and gas. With major oil discoveries in West Texas in the early and mid-twenties, the boom was on, and Odessa was only too eager to embrace the characteristics that distinguished other Texas boom towns of the period: wild overcrowding, lawlessness, prostitution, chronic diarrhea, bad water, streets that were so deep in mud that teams of oxen had to be called in to pull the oil field machinery, and a rat problem so severe that the local theater put out a rat bounty and would let you in free if you produced twelve rat tails.

  Odessa established itself as a distribution point for oil field equipment and experienced more growth in a month than it had in ten years, inundated by men who were called simply boomers. They came into town once a week, their skin scummy and stinking and blackened from oil and caked-on dirt, to get a bath and a shave at the barbershop. Young children ogled at them when they appeared because it was unimaginable, even by the standards of children, to find anyone as dirty as these men were.

  From 1926 on, Odessa became forever enmeshed in the cycles of the boom-and-bust oil town. It made for a unique kind of schizophrenia, the highs of the boom years like a drug-induced euphoria followed by the lows of the bust and the realization that everything you had made during the boom had just been lost, followed again by the euphoria of boom years, followed again by the depression of another bust, followed by another boom and yet another bust, followed by a special prayer to the Lord, which eventually showed up on bumper stickers of pickups in the eighties, for one more boom with a vow “not to piss this one away.”

  There was a small nucleus of people who settled here and worked here and cared about the future of the town, who thought about convention centers and pleasant downtown shopping and all the other traditional American mainstays. But basically it became a transient town, a place to come to and make money when the boom was on and then get as far away from as possible with the inevitable setting in of the bust. If a man or woman wasn’t making money, there wasn’t much reason to stay.

  Hub Heap, who came out here in 1939 and later started a successful oil field supply company, remembered well the single event that embodied his early days in Odessa. It was a torrent of sand, looking like a rain cloud, that came in from the northwest and turned the place so dark in the afternoon light that the street lamps suddenly started glowing. Nothing escaped the hideousness of that sand. It crept in everywhere, underneath the rafters, insid
e the walls, like an endless army of tiny ants, covering him, suffocating him, pushing down into his lungs, blinding his eyes, and that night he had no choice but to sleep with a wet towel over his face just so he could breathe.

  Odessa also became tough and quick-fisted, filled with men who hardly needed a high school diploma, much less a college one, to become roughnecks and tool pushers on an oil rig. They spent a lot of time in trucks traveling to remote corners of the earth to put in a string of drill pipe, and when they went home to Odessa to unwind they did not believe in leisurely drinking or witty repartee. More often than not, they did not believe in conversation, their dispositions reflecting the rough, atonal quality of the land, which after the droughts consisted mostly of the gnarled limbs of low-lying mesquite bushes. Outside of the oil business, the weather (which almost never changed), and high school football, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to talk about.

  J. D. Cone, when he came here from Oklahoma in 1948 to become a family practitioner, went on house calls with a thirty-eight pistol stuck into his belt after the sheriff told him it was always a good idea to be armed in case someone got a little ornery or disagreed with the diagnosis. Right after he arrived, he went with a friend to the notorious Ace of Clubs. Everything was fine until mid-evening, Cone remembers, when it was time for the nightly revue and beer bottles started flying through the air. No one except Cone thought much about it. It did reinforce for him his initial impression of Odessa, when all he could see as he drove into town the first time was the red cast of the clouds from a winter storm. At night there was the equally eerie sight of the gas flares, huge fissures of fire coming from the oil rigs where natural gas, an unwanted burden back then, was being burned off.

  “This must not be planet earth,” Cone told his partner. “This must be hell.”

  But it wasn’t. It was just Odessa.

  During the next boom period in the seventies and eighties, Odessa made a telltale leap into the twentieth century. A branch of the University of Texas was built and a new suburban-style mall opened, but the hearty, hair-trigger temperament of the place still remained intact. Differences of opinion were still sometimes settled by vengeful retribution, resulting in the kinds of brutal, visceral crimes that were supposed to take place in cities of several million, not in one of barely over a hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, most of these grisly killings occurred during the height of the boom, when money and madness overran much of the town.

  In 1982, the thirty-seven murders that took place inside Ector County gave Odessa the distinction of having the highest murder rate in the country. Most agreed that was a pretty high number, but mention of gun control was as popular as a suggestion to change the Ten Commandments.

  A year later, Odessa made national news again when someone made the fateful mistake of accusing an escaped convict from Alabama named Leamon Ray Price of cheating in a high-stakes poker game. Price, apparently insulted by such a charge, went to the bathroom and then came out shooting with his thirty-eight. He barricaded himself behind a bookcase while the players he was trying to kill hid under the poker table. By the time Odessa police detective Jerry Smith got there the place looked like something out of the Wild West, an old-fashioned shoot-out at the La Casita apartment complex with poker chips and cards and bullet holes all over the dining room. Two men were dead and two wounded when Price made his escape. His fatal error came when he tried to break into a house across the street. The startled owner, hearing the commotion, did what he thought was only appropriate: he took out his gun and shot Price dead.

  It was incidents such as these that gave Odessa its legacy.

  In 1987, Money magazine ranked it as the fifth worst city to live in in the country out of three hundred. A year later Psychology Today, in a ranking of the most stressful cities in the country based on rates of alcoholism, crime, suicide, and divorce, placed Odessa seventh out of 286 metropolitan areas, worse than New York and Detroit and Philadelphia and Houston. Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, described Odessa as an “armpit,” which, as the Odessa American pointed out, was actually quite a few rungs up from its usual anatomical comparison with a rectum. And there was the description in Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, which simply called Odessa the “worst town on earth.”

  But none of that seemed to matter. Oil promised money through work on drilling rigs and frac crews and acidizing units, and it meant people were willing to live here whatever the deprivation. What pride they had in Odessa came from their very survival in a place they openly admitted was physically wretched.

  Whether it was true or not, most people said they had first come out here during a sandstorm, meaning their first taste of Odessa had literally been a mouthful of gritty sand. They carried that mouthful with them forever, rolling it around with their tongues every now and then, never forgetting the dry grit of it. It reminded them of what they had been through to forge a life and a community and that they had a right to be proud of their accomplishments.

  It was still a place that seemed on the edge of the frontier, a paradoxical mixture of the Old South and the Wild West, friendly to a fault but fiercely independent, God-fearing and propped up by the Baptist beliefs in family and flag but hell-raising, spiced with the edge of violence but naive and thoroughly unpretentious.

  It was a place where neighbor loved helping neighbor, based on a long-standing tradition that ranchers always left their homes unlocked because you never knew who might need to borrow something or cook a meal. But it was a place also based on the principle that no one should ever be told what to do by anyone, that the best government of all was no government at all, which is why most citizens hated welfare, thought Michael Dukakis, beyond having the irreversible character flaw of being a Democrat, was the biggest damn fool ever to enter politics, considered Lyndon Johnson an egocentric buffoon responsible for the boondoggle of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and saw the federal government’s effort to integrate the Odessa schools in the fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties not as social progress but as outrageous harassment.

  At times Odessa had the feel of lingering sadness that many isolated places have, a sense of the world orbiting around it at dizzying speed while it stood stuck in time—350 miles from Dallas to the east, 300 miles from El Paso to the west, 300 miles from the rest of the world—still fixed in an era in which it was inappropriate for high school girls to be smarter than their boyfriends, in which kids spent their Saturday nights making the endless circles of the drag in their cars along the wide swathes of Forty-second Street and Andrews Highway, in which teenage honor was measured not by how much cocaine you snorted, but by how much beer you drank.

  But Odessa also evoked the kind of America that Ronald Reagan always seemed to have in mind during his presidency, a place still rooted in the sweet nostalgia of the fifties—unsophisticated, basic, raw—a place where anybody could be somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American Dream, however wobbly they had become.

  In the summer twilight, against the backdrop of the enormous sky where braids of orange and purple and red and blue as delicately hued as a butterfly wing stretched into eternity, young girls with ponytails and freckles went up and down neighborhood streets on their roller skates. As the cool breeze of night set in, neighboring families pulled up plastic lawn chairs to conduct “chair committee” and casually meander over the day’s events without rancor or argument or constant one-upmanship. On other nights, parents gently roused their children from bed near the stroke of midnight so they could sit together by the garage to watch a thunderstorm roll in from Big Spring, gliding across the sky with its shimmering madness, those angular fingers of light cutting through the night in a spectacle almost as exciting as a Permian High School football game.

  There were many people in Odessa who, after the initial shock, had slowly fallen in love with the town. They found something endearing about it, something tender; it was the scorned mutt that no one else wanted. They had come to grips with the
numbing vacantness of the surroundings, broken only by the black horses’ heads of oil pumpjacks moving up and down with maniacal monotony through heat and wind and dust and economic ruin.

  There were also those who had grown weary of it and the oft-repeated phrase that what made it special was the quality of its people. “Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself,” said Warren Burnett, a loquacious, liberal-minded lawyer who after roughly thirty years had fled the place like a refugee for the coastal waters near Houston. “Nothing could be sillier than we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of assholes as anywhere.”

  There were those who found it insufferably racist and those who didn’t find it racist at all, but used the word nigger as effortlessly as one would sprinkle salt on a slab of rib eye and worried about the Mexicans who seemed to be overtaking the place. There were those who had been made rich by it, and many more who had gone broke from it in recent times. But they seemed gratified, as Mayor Don Carter, who was one of those to go big-time belly up, put it, to have taken a “chance in the free enterprise market.”

  There were a few who found its conservatism maddening and dangerous and many more who found it the essence of what America should be, an America built on strength and the spirit of individualism, not an America built on handouts and food stamps. There were those who found solace in the strong doses of religion poured out every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning by its sixty-two Baptist churches, nineteen Church of Christ churches, twelve Assembly of God churches, eleven Methodist churches, seven Catholic churches, and five Pentecostal churches. And there were those like Burnett, who saw religion in Odessa used not to reinforce religious beliefs at all but as an excuse for people to come together and be made comfortable with their own social beliefs in racial and gender bigotry.

  Across the country there were thousands of places just like it, places that were not only isolated but insulated, places that had gone through the growing pains of America without anyone paying attention, places that existed as islands unto themselves with no link to the great cities except that they all sang the same national anthem to the same flag at sporting events. They were the kind of places that you saw from a plane on a clear night if you happened to look out the window, a concentration of little beaded dots breaking up the empty landscape with several veins leading in and out, and then bleak emptiness once again.