by Joan Connor
I tell Austry Ann to go get in the jeep.
The notary has disappeared through a beaded door, the beads still clacking when she returns. As she rubs her exposed stomach, her puffy bellybutton like a wheel beneath Gene Simmons’ jagged face, she tells me her fee for notarizing.
“You must be joking,” I say. Then I am back at the jeep with Austry Ann who is crying again.
She says, “See, see. If it’s bad, it happens to me. What was that?” She leans her head against the steering wheel.
“Who knows. I mean she is a notary public, but, Jesus, Austry Ann you don’t have to answer personal questions about your sex life to get a financial statement notarized. Maybe they front a singles club or a swingles club. Maybe they are a two person tingles tag team club. Who knows? You walk in, you’re beautiful. You’re bait. but when it feels creepy, it probably is. Bolt.”
Austry Ann shifts gears. Now she’s No Tears Austry Ann. She’s thumping the steering wheel and ginning up. “SEE. See. It’s not my fault I’m beautiful. What? Do I have a sign on me that says, Fuck with me? Is that all people see? I am pretty, got tits, so you can mess with me any way you like. This isn’t normal. We should go in there and fucking trash those people. Like my life isn’t bad enough. I got a lousy job. I am in the middle of a divorce. I got kinky noter republics trying to crawl up my ass. See, if it’s bad. . . .”
I can’t help it. “Austry Ann.” I have to say it again because she’s a yeller. “AUSTRY Ann. You’ve got a job. In the middle of a recession. You’re beautiful. You split up with your husband because you were fucking around. You have a place to live, food. You whine more than anyone I know. We are on the verge of a war. We have an idiot in the White House who wants to maraud into an impoverished country, rip the globe to pieces, expose Americans to retaliatory terrorist attacks. The decision comes Monday, and you are sitting here in a pool of self-pity because two soft core freaks process your papers. What would you ever do with a real problem?”
Austry Ann’s poodle scrunchi is popping off her ponytail. “Oh, you don’t understand. You don’t—”
“But I do understand. That’s the whole problem.You are the only person with hardships. Your hardships are luxuries, Austry Ann. Luxuries. And so are your moods.”
I turn my head. I can’t look at her. She is beautiful even when her mouth is opening and closing, waiting for some words to come, any words, the right words. And they won’t.
She surprises me. She says very quietly, “I don’t know what’s going on in the world.”
I am still looking out the window at the dry blasted lawn, the billboard pothead, the clapboard bungalow, the ugliness of it all. “No one does,” I lie.
I feel a hand, hers, Austry Ann’s on the back of my neck.
I do not turn my head. “I am moving out,” I say. That is not a lie.
“You got nowhere to go,” Austry Ann says. I hear panic rising in her voice, twitching in the fingers on the back of my neck.
“I know.”
It’s my last night in Texas. Austry Ann wants to go to San Antonio. To celebrate, she says. She means, commemorate. Maybe she means celebrate. But neither of us is feeling very celebratory. Austry Ann needs to find a new roommate. I told her that maybe she should try that notary public’s service. She threw her hairbrush at me, but she was fooling. Me, too.
I have nowhere to go. I took some of my savings from my last job as a temp, what’s left over after my plane fare, and bought a 1964 Galaxie convertible. One hundred dollars, cash on the barrelhead. Cars down here are immortal. Not a bad price tag for immortality. The top is ninety-nine percent duct tape, but I’ll just pray that the weather holds.
Austry Ann wants to go to Riverwalk. I’ve never been. And I know that Austry Ann really wants to go because she keeps humming that Patsy Cline tune, San Antonio Rose. Bob Wills wrote that song in 1938; he added the lyrics later, 1940, The New San Antonio Rose. That’s the one that Patsy sings; a lot of people don’t know that. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
Austry Ann’s singing, “Broken song, empty words I know, Still live in my heart all alone.” We’re going to San Antone.
We’re at Riverwalk listening to an all pipe and whistle band. It echoes on the water and bridges. Tejano music. Haunting, lamenting, beautiful. I am less sure about Riverwalk. I mean, it’s pretty, but it looks like someone’s idea of Venice, like how Venice would look on that Disney World ride, “It’s a small world after all.” A liter-alist named Riverwalk. It is a river (small) and bridges (many). It is shops and restaurants with umbrellas and trees cascading with glittery lights and girls wearing paper flower wreaths. Pretty, but it has a spanking wholesomeness, an artificiality like some project concocted by the Chamber of Commerce. But I am patient. It’s Austry Ann’s night. Her night out. I am leaving tomorrow and I am clueless where to.
So I walk with Austry Ann and watch the men get lecher’s whiplash ogling her. We listen to this band and that, drink Margaritas here and there, eat fajitas, watch the beautiful people watch the tourists watch the beautiful people watch the tourists, all of whom watch Austry Ann.
Tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s day. Tomorrow that moron declares whether or not we are going to war. You wouldn’t know it by this place. Party on. No Irish about it.
I think that we lost the lesson too fast, the lesson of 9/11. I keep thinking that maybe an object lesson would help. We choose some suburban community like Austin, say, and we just choose a few families and we bomb their houses and kill their children and bomb the schools and hospitals. Just as a lesson in empathy. They’d have to volunteer of course. We’d learn in a hurry. Hell, Americans go haywire when they lose power for an hour. Or cable. We need to remember. Mourning, loss—these are not about infrastructure.
Austry Ann and I are sitting at a café table beside the water at some steak place. Beef is king in Texas. Austry Ann says, “You aren’t having much fun on your last night.” She’s licking salt off the rim of her glass. The flick of her tongue almost levitates the beefy geezer at the next table.
“This is great.”
“You need to have more fun,” Austry Ann says. “You’re too intellectual.”
I almost snort frozen lime crystals out my nose.
Austry Ann says, “You know what you need?”
I shake my head. I think about Jack’s Joke Store.What every girl needs.
“You need to see the Alamo. That’s right. Here you are in Texas, and you haven’t seen it. It’s famous. I forget why. But you’re deep, so you’ll appreciate it.”
I follow Austry Ann down stairs and up stairs and over bridges and down sidewalks and we turn the corner of some modern office building, and there it is, moonlit, just like in the song. The Mission San Antonio de Valero, as white and shimmery as the moonlight itself. It offers itself to the sky like a prayer, like a votive candle’s smoke. How small it looks here, its history dwarfed by the towering office buildings. But it is beautiful.
I grab Austry Ann’s hand and tell her so. I am thinking about missions. The first one here, Christian, to convert Native Americans. Later, “the cradle of Texas Liberty,” where Davy Crockett died and Jim Bowie. I am thinking how history is a cradle that keeps rocking in one bad actor after another, rocking in, rocking out, rocking on. This luminous building seems too pearly, too pure to be the site of all the blood shed here. I guess that time bleaches all the stains of history. Here every one of the Texan volunteers died, rebelling against the dictator, Santa Ana, who proclaimed victory. But his aide observed, “One more such glorious victory and we are finished.”
We do not learn.
“This place is dead,” Austry Ann says. “Sunday night. Let’s go home.” And we do.
Austry Ann is asleep. I pack the Galaxie with the two cases that I brought with me from Boston. I look at the smoggy Austin sky, wish that it were starry, a more propitious omen for departure. I leave Austry Ann a note saying that I’ll call (and I will) and I am gone.
It’s four in th
e morning and I am pushing sixty on the Galaxie, pushing fifty myself. Spent the last two decades working as a temp. I suppose that we are all temps in the biggest sense, but here I am now, homeless again and not knowing which way to go. West? Why? Light out for the Territories? The rest are all ahead. California or bust? North? South? East? All bust. All busted. The whole country has become a bad joke store.
When I hit Austin’s City Limits, I am testifying, I am testifying right out loud to myself in a well-preserved Ford Galaxie. I am the NOTER REPUBLIC, and we are at the limits. Nomadic again, everywhere I go, that’s where I am. The continent is shrinking around me like a polyester costume washed one too many times. One more such glorious victory and we are finished.
Austin City Limits recently staged a reunion of the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills sold his club in Dallas, the Bob Wills Ranch House, to Jack Ruby. In the fifties. Not many people know that. See, it all relates. History is not stored in small plaqued buildings. History is always now, and these are dangerous times.
I have no idea where I am going, but, if I could, I’d jam into reverse and drive backward to Elvis, and Marilyn, and Patsy before they became costumes, praying for this country, for some other eventuality, for some other future. Then what? Then what?
I am just driving. I drive. Like cattle driven, I drive.
Got a song on the broken radio: Where in dreams I live with a memory, Beneath the stars all alone.
I just keep moving. What else is there to do.
Drive. Driving. Drive.
The Landmark Hotel
ON THE DAY THAT C.C.’s mother did not meet Janis Joplin, “A Boy Named Sue” was a hit record. By Johnny Cash. Ceci hated that song. C.C.’s mother named her C.C. for C.C. Rider, the Janis Joplin version, but her friends all thought that her name was Ceci, short for Cecile. Ceci called her mother Dee, short for Deirdre which Dee was fond of telling her was Irish for sorrow. Ceci and Dee. Their boarder, Bobbie, said it was like living in alphabet soup. Or a mediocre report card. Bobbie went to the community college, but it was just the beginning, he said, of a bigger, brighter future in Reality TV. Reality TV is the future, he said.
“Reality TV is an oxymoron,” Dee said, crushed her cigarette into the ashtray and peeled a banana at the kitchen table which also served as her desk.
Ceci hated to pick sides.
Here’s how Bobbie came to live in their home. It was a nice home, a bungalow from the 30’s, maybe a little dark because of the deep front porch and decorated in a style that Ceci thought of as Archeological Bohemian. Spanish shawls dripped fringe from the walls. Ethnic masks and crude stringed instruments grew beards of dust. Dee’s scrapbooks towered on every flat surface. But the bungalow had oak floors and plaster walls like they didn’t build them anymore, Dee said. Like the kitchen table which Dee used as her desk, chrome and bright red, a Deco dinosaur. Ceci and Dee loved the house, and Ceci and Dee were broke. They couldn’t bear to part with the bungalow, Edifice Complex. The house had an extra bedroom which used to be Dee’s office before she took over the kitchen.
Dee never married Ceci’s dad. It was the seventies, you know, Dee explained. (Except that it was actually the eighties.) We were all bumbling around the country like Pod People. Hey man, where you from? Where you going ? You smoked some reefer, did some blow, fucked, and hit the road again.
Sometimes when Dee told the story, Ceci’s father’s name was Ginger; sometimes it was Cassady. It didn’t matter. He was headed, Dee thought, to Mexico and fell off the edge of her map whatever his destination. So Dee raised Ceci. Sort of fly-by-night, sort of catch-as-catch-can, sort of improv theater.
Dee waited tables or flipped short order eggs and burgers and belonged to the local repertory theater group, The Blue Angel Theater Troupe, until the drinking problem got a little out of hand. The theater people, some local gay guys who missed New York and Broadway, some rich civic-minded mavens, were nice about it. Take some time off. Take care of yourself. Come back when you are better. Dee wasn’t better yet and money was tight, so Dee emptied the office until it was a bedroom again and advertised for a boarder. Hence Bobbie.
And Ceci? Since changing her name in middle school because people kept asking what her initials stood for—Cathy Caroline? Courtney Cherry? Colleen Crystal? Because the moron-a-tons in her class, Robert and that jerkerato Trevor, started the rumor that it stood for the C word, started calling her Cunt-cunt, so she just told everybody that it was Ceci, short for Cecile. She didn’t tell them that Cecile meant blind, but it did. She’d looked it up. Since then, since Ceci became Ceci, she had helped Dee out. She kicked in her waitressing and baby sitting money. And she’d worked in a video store for a while now. She’d mowed lawns. Not with a riding mower either, but a push mower. 5.5 horsepower. No C.C. Rider.
She’d looked up the lyrics to C.C. Rider too, and she had wondered what C.C. really did stand for. At first, when it was first written, first sung. Did it mean see like in the song? So see C. C. Rider, see what you done done. The lyrics stuttered. Did it mean Close call? Cavalier convertible ? Corn cob?
My home is on the water. I don’t like no land at all.
What did that mean? Maybe the C. was sea. She was a sea-rider. It didn’t matter any longer; Ceci was Ceci in the same way that Bobbie was Bobbie and right now he was see-seeing what he could help-help himself to out of the fridge and Ceci could tell by the way that Dee peered closer at her clippings at her Deco desk that she was reading him right out of print, right out of the kitchen, that Dee hadn’t made her mind up about him yet, whether she liked Bobbie or not which was a little complicated because Ceci had fucked him last night for the first time which meant, she supposed, that she wanted to do it again—although Dee didn’t know that yet because she hadn’t really gotten better like her theater friends had suggested, at least not yet. While Ceci and Bobbie were in a lust clutch, their own little reality show, Lead Us into Temptation Island, Dee was in a wine swoon.
Now Bobbie was eating a slab of cold lasagna out of his hand which wasn’t really an endearing mannerism, and Ceci wondered why she had tussled with him. She knew from the first that she wasn’t attracted to him. He had one of those haircuts that made him look as if his name was Cedric, the deliberate dweeb DO that guys were sporting now. The center twist like a Frosty-cone custard. The one Martin Short’s character wore in the SNL reruns, Ed Grimley boinging around the room like a neurotic Chihuahua on an Ecstasy rave trampoline. “That is NOT a good look, I must say.”
And the rimless glasses, and the big pants, and the bad tattoo of a spider with its legs in some kind of Celtic knot or maybe it was a web. And now the lasagna in his palm and the slurpy cartoon noises like Mel Blanc eating with a speech impediment. Nope, she wasn’t really attracted to him.
“Use a plate,” Dee said without turning around.
“In a rush,” Bobbie said. “Got a lot of homework.”
“You pay room not board,” Dee said. exhaling dragon plumes of pale blue smoke.
“I will get him a plate,” Ceci said.
Bobbie hoovered the lasagna like a seal swilling a tinker and winked. “Hate to eat and run, doll. The homework calls.”
“Translation,” Dee said. “There’s some meretricious shit on TV that he and a few other million of the walking comatose got to watch.”
“Dee,” Ceci said. Let’s all try to be nice.”
“What did nice ever have to do with anything?” Dee asked. She flapped a page of her scrapbook. “The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. George Bernard Shaw.”
“Dee,” Bobbie said. “What kind of a name is Dee? Sort of a novelty song? Put da lime in da coconut and drink DEE bowl up? It’s dee lemon. It’s dee lime? Dee feet went over dee fence before dee tail?”
“It’s short for Deirdre. It is Irish for sorrow.” She patted her henna red curls and struck a pose with her cigarette which once was glamorous; today it was simply cancerous.
“And don’t you think it’s a littl
e odd, Ceci, for a mother to insist that her daughter call her Dee?” Bobbie headed down the hall. “D for dipsomaniac. D for dysfunctional. D for delirium tremens.” His bedroom door slammed. The brassy jingle of a Cruise ship ad blared.
Actually, Ceci did think that it was odd. But it had been odd for a long time which made it seem less odd. Dee for Mom. Not odd at all. Time was like that.
Dee shrugged and glanced at the empty glass by her elbow. Ceci found empty glasses all over the house, full ashtrays and empty glasses. Glasses on the player piano, on the shelves which propped Dee’s theater glam shots against dusty books. Dee always pronounced it the-ay-ter which Bobbie said was an affliction, but Ceci thought that he meant affectation. Empty glasses with amber halos in the punts or rings of carnelian red.
“Would you like some tea?” Ceci asked.
“Did I ever tell you about the time that I met Janis Joplin?” Dee asked.
“You need to get out more,” Ceci said.
After Dee went to bed, Ceci stood outside of Bobbie’s door, listening to the electric burble of his TV. She wasn’t certain about the etiquette involved in screwing your tenant. Should she knock? Should she wait for an invitation. “Bobbie?” No answer. Maybe he couldn’t hear her. She knocked. Light caromed into the hall.
“Oh. It’s you,” Bobbie said. He squinted over his glasses. “I’m doing homework.”
Ceci could see the colored lights of the TV play over his rumpled bed.
He slumped against the door jamb. “Yeah, this is great. You ought to see this guy Trump. Looks like he has a drugged ferret on his head. It’s aces.”
Ceci said, “I didn’t know if . . . .”