Some Can Whistle

by Larry McMurtry

  I yearned, but I didn’t go back: Danny Deck Day never happened.

  Now I was definitely going back, in fact, was almost there. Huntsville and its prison were already behind me. Apprehension, which had been flitting across my nerve ends since my daughter’s first call, flitted ever more rapidly. Not only would I soon have to reckon with a child I had never seen; I would also have to reckon with a city I had once loved deeply but had neglected for twenty-two years.

  The women I knew always exacted an immediate price for the most minor neglect; even Gladys was not above giving me margarine rather than butter on my pancakes, though I had repeatedly forbidden her even to buy margarine—if she thought I was inattentive to what she called her “situation” for a few days—her “situation” being her ever-shifting relations with Chuck, who had lately shown an increasing tendency to absent himself to places as far afield as Tucumcari.

  If Gladys, my faithful cook, repaid my neglect with margarine, what would a female entity as powerful as Houston do? Would she forgive all and draw me back to her bosom? Or forgive nothing and suck me off the freeway into a bad neighborhood, where I would be shot down by a young crack dealer with an Uzi before I even got my bearings.

  Twenty-two years is a long time; more than a generation, as generations are now reckoned. Even though I averted my eyes at newsstands and flipped past articles in The Times, I had not missed the fact that Houston had grown; huge when I left, it was now much more huge. I was scarcely past the town of Conroe when plinthlike glass buildings began to appear, at first singly, then in clusters. To the east, near the airport, a kind of minicity seemed to have risen.

  I had gotten a late start; the day was ebbing and the pastels of a summer evening colored the sky above and behind the downtown skyline when I came in sight of it. A stately white battleship of a cloud was crossing the ship channel toward Galveston.

  I began to relax a little; though most of the downtown had not been there when I left, the clouds, the pastel sunset, and the sky itself had a familiar and reassuring beauty.

  Just as the freeway passed over Buffalo Bayou a pickup passed me on the right—a little surprising, since I was still slicing along at a comfortable eighty-five. I glanced over in time to catch a glimpse of the driver, a big, raunchy-looking girl with long hair flying. She was putting on her eye makeup while rocketing over downtown Houston at roughly ninety-five miles an hour. The hand that had been assigned to the steering wheel was also finger-tapping in rhythm with a song I couldn’t hear.

  The girl must have sensed my glance; she looked over and gave me a big toothy grin, eyebrow brush still poised; she honked loudly, as if to say, Let’s go, then she was past. On the curve ahead I was still close enough to see her open a lipstick.

  I slowed down and drifted off the freeway at the next exit, relaxed and feeling fine. I was fine; moreover, I was home. The spirit of Houston might have assigned that girl to pass me just when she did; where else do girls drive pickups at ninety-five while doing their eye makeup? Besides that, driving so well that you don’t even have the sense that anything reckless is happening? The main thing, obviously, is getting to the party while the party’s fresh.

  I touched a button and my window went down, letting in the old fishy smell of Houston, moist and warm, a smell composed of many textures. I stopped at a 7-Eleven on West Dallas Street, already back in love with the place. Now all I had to do was consult a phone book, make a list of Mr. Burgers, and go meet my daughter.

  19

  Mr. Burger was not yet a threat to McDonald’s—not in Houston at least. There were only three locations listed in the phone book: Airline Road, Telephone Road, and Dismuke Street. Airline lay to the north—I had missed it coming in. The address on Telephone Road had such a high street number it could almost have been in the Gulf of Mexico.

  “I bet she works in the one on Dismuke Street,” I said out loud.

  “They don’t call it Dismuke Street no more,” a man said.

  I looked around but didn’t immediately spot the source of the voice.

  “Now they call it Pit Bull Avenue,” the voice said.

  The voice seemed to come from above me, and in fact did come from above me. An old man wearing tennis shoes and cutoffs sat on the rim of a giant blue dumpster.

  “I think my daughter works on Dismuke Street,” I said by way of explanation.

  “She’s lucky she ain’t had a leg chewed off, if that’s the case,” the man said. “I’d call this a friendly town but I wouldn’t call Dismuke Street a friendly street. I’m from the Panhandle myself, but the fact is I hate the goddamn Panhandle. Got any change?”

  In fact, I didn’t. I had only hundred-dollar bills. For the last few months Gladys had taken care of all my petty expenses. Change wouldn’t have worked in a caftan, anyway.

  “I’m sorry, I only have large bills,” I said.

  “I can spend them too,” the man said, easing down from his perch. “I’m Kendall.”

  “Hi, Kendall,” I said. “Thanks for warning me about the pit bulls.”

  “I’d rather live in a dumpster in the great city of Houston than to own the best wheat farm in the Panhandle,” Kendall said. “I hate wheat and I hate farming and I hate the goddamn Panhandle. Do you own a machine gun?”

  “No, why?” I asked.

  “They’re about the only weapon that’s effective against the common pit bull,” Kendall said.

  20

  Dismuke Street, as I recalled, was in the Lawndale area—an area between the Gulf Freeway and the ship channel that was the home of many warehouses. I could not recall that Dismuke was much of a street, and my memory was accurate not only as to its location but also as to its not being much of a street.

  The mere fact that I still had such a good memory for even relatively minor Houston streets—those, that is, with no mythology—struck me as a good sign, in terms of my aesthetic future. Perhaps I could yet manage to become the city’s Balzac.

  On the other hand, my brief encounter with Kendall, a well-spoken man who lived in a dumpster, seemed like a bad sign. Why was I fated to keep running into eccentrics on the order of Godwin, Kendall, and the several hundred others I had run into through the years? Was the whole human race eccentric, or was there something within me that drew eccentrics to me like filings to a magnet?

  In fact, the constant presence of eccentrics was the one constant factor in my life. Even a reclusive strategy didn’t really save me from them, for if I wasn’t still meeting them on the street or in hotel lobbies or airports, my imagination was spewing them up in an unending, disquieting stream.

  Even “Al and Sal,” my one hundred-and-ninety-eight episode hymn to normal American domestic life, had its share of eccentrics, including Al, the most normal male I had ever been able to imagine. An automobile salesman by day, Al became a lawn fanatic at night. One of the staple comedy lines in the series, sure to be worked in at least every third episode, was Al’s penchant for mowing his lawn at one in the morning. He had equipped his power mower with automobile headlights so he could do a neat job of mowing. Naturally Sal, the kids, and the neighbors all objected to this particular, sleep-disturbing eccentricity of Al’s. The kids sometimes ran away from home rather than go to school and face the taunts of their peers, taunts all directed at their father’s eccentricity. Sal constantly threatened to leave if he didn’t promise to mow the lawn only in the daytime, and the neighbors tried everything from lawsuits to sabotage to stop him.

  Al, a stubborn man, held his own with them all, sometimes operating his lawn mower and his power hedge-trimmer until three in the morning. He refused to yield. “Leave!” he told Sal (she didn’t). “Leave!” he told his children (they left but soon came back). The neighbors he told a great variety of things, edging as close to “Fuck you” as we could get on a national network.

  “I’m proud of my lawn,” Al said. “Due to the fact that I have to make a living for a bunch of ingrates, I can’t devote the daylight hours to taking car
e of it properly to the extent that it deserves, you know. So I devote the nighttime hours to taking care of it properly. You want me to neglect my lawn? Are you communists or what? I’ll never neglect my lawn. Not unless they bury me beneath it will I neglect my lawn. All of you whom don’t like it, get blanked.”

  At first the network refused to allow Al to say “Get blanked”—several screaming-match meetings were devoted entirely to the subject—but finally they let us try it and it worked so well that within a month millions of Americans who habitually said “Get fucked” were saying “Get blanked” instead.

  Al, my lawn eccentric, not only managed to clean up the language slightly; he also convinced the country that mowing the lawn in the middle of the night was a normal American thing, a right among other classic American rights. Many polls were taken—even the Washington Post took one—and in all of them Al gained at least a 90 percent approval rate. True, the American Lawn Care Association, fearing a grass-roots revolt of some sort, issued a statement deploring the after-hours use of power mowers, but nobody paid any attention to them.

  The confusing thing about that uproar was that Al Stoppard was not supposed to be the eccentric on the show. The eccentric was a neighbor named Jenny, three houses down from Al and Sal. Jenny was a bird freak, with more than one hundred birdhouses on her property. Jenny plus Al made for a noisy neighborhood; by day the block was filled with the chirping of hundreds of birds, by night it resonated with Al’s mowing. Jenny was one of Al’s bitterest foes, too, claiming that his mowing caused her birds to suffer from sleep deprivation.

  “One of my pigeons got so sleepy while flying it fell to its death,” a grieving Jenny told Al in one memorable confrontation.

  “Who’s gonna miss one pigeon?” Al responded, a bit defensively—secretly he was a little sweet on Jenny.

  “Me, that’s who, you pigeon murderer!” Jenny screamed, swatting him with a bag of birdseed.

  The episode had national repercussions, pitting as it did the pigeon lovers against the lawn fanatics; I issued several statements in an attempt to calm the waters, meanwhile laughing all the way to my broker’s office.

  As the years passed, Al stayed normal but for his one little eccentricity, whereas poor Jenny got crazier; her lover, Joe, a TV repairman much respected in the neighborhood, got in his TV truck one day and drove away.

  “I love you, Jenny, but I can’t take any more birds,” Joe said, tears in his eyes.

  His departure broke America’s heart; Joe was a popular character. Actually, his contract was up and he was angling for a series of his own, otherwise I would have seen to it that he hung in there with Jenny a few more seasons. Joe, in real life a horrible little actor named Leland, who spent his spare time parked across from North Hollywood High trying to pick up high school girls, was not one of my favorite people, and I was delighted when the series he secured for himself failed well before mid-season.

  Jenny, however, kind of went to pieces once Joe left. She took to cruising the freeways at all hours of the night and day, trying to rescue wounded birds; soon her backyard was full of bedraggled hawks with broken wings. The neighborhood, previously tolerant of Jenny, began to have its doubts. Several housewives who had been sweet on Joe soon turned against her. Even Sal, a generous woman, turned against her.

  “Joe was the best thing that ever happened to Jenny,” Sal declared. “So look what she did. She drove him off for a hundred million birds.”

  “Please don’t exaggerate,” Al pleaded. Sal’s modus operandi was exaggeration, and Al hated it. “She doesn’t have a hundred million birds,” he said. “I doubt if she’s even got twenty million.”

  “Do you want a divorce so you can move in with her, is that what this conversation’s all about?” Sal asked, her eyes blazing.

  One of my personal misfortunes is that I can still remember every scene and every line of dialogue in all one hundred and ninety-eight episodes of “Al and Sal.” Wake me from a sound sleep—if you can ever catch me in a sound sleep—and ask me what Al said to Sal in a particular episode and I’ll mumble it at once. For a decade that show was my life—my only life; if I live to be a hundred I doubt I’ll ever forget a single one of Sal’s many stinging retorts.

  Al didn’t move in with Jenny, but he was, to the end, her most loyal supporter. The end was not pretty, either. One day Jenny brought home a young buzzard that had not risen from its meal of road kill quite fast enough. A car clipped it, dealing it a hard bump (sensing that America had about had its fill of birds with broken wings, I was never very specific about the buzzard’s injuries). Jenny soon found it, brought it home with her, and fell in love with it.

  From then on her decline was swift. Her other birds ceased to interest her: she had only eyes for her buzzard. Soon she found another, and then another, as more and more buzzards failed to leave their meals of dead rabbit and skunk quickly enough. Jenny brought them all home. Then one day, despairing of ever having a normal love life again, she awoke with a grand vision: she would turn her backyard into a buzzard aviary. She envisioned a great canopy of some sort under which hundreds of buzzards would lead secure lives, no longer having to snatch a bite of skunk here and there as the traffic of the freeways thundered down upon them. Jenny herself would go out at night and collect the road kill; when the buzzards hopped off their perches in the morning their breakfasts would be waiting.

  As more and more buzzards began to fill Jenny’s backyard, and as news of her plans for a buzzard aviary leaked to the whole neighborhood, the neighbors, patient for so long, finally revolted. Nobody wanted a buzzard aviary in the neighborhood. Some were of the opinion that buzzards carried the AIDS virus; others pointed out that property values were sure to plummet.

  To make matters worse, Jenny, once Sal’s only rival as a neighborhood beauty, began to neglect her appearance. Birds—in particular, buzzards—were all she cared about. Once a highly respected, even proper woman, Jenny became a kind of bag lady, right under the neighborhood’s (and America’s) eyes.

  In the many debates that followed, Al was the voice of moderation, the voice of sanity. He defended Jenny endlessly, pointing out that many neighborhoods, some not far away, had worse things to contend with than buzzards—crack, for instance, and street gangs. Realizing that he was her only ally, Jenny forgave Al the death of her pigeon; the two inevitably grew closer, watched by a suspicious Sal.

  The neighbors weren’t impressed with Al’s sanity. He was, after all, the man who mowed his lawn at one in the morning. Soon anti-buzzard sentiment flared into the open. Some of the angrier mothers sent their kids up and down the street carrying signs that said things like “Keep Out Carrion-Eaters,” or “Buzzards Eat Skunks!”

  Poor Jenny, never a strong character, wilted under the neighborhood’s pressure. Little children for whom Jenny had once baked cookies paraded past her house with ugly signs. Jenny didn’t fight; the Dian Fossey of buzzards she was not. Sadly she dismantled her hundred birdhouses, took her beloved buzzards back to advantageous spots in the wild, far from the murderous freeways. One day she surprised Al in one of his nocturnal mowings. Her station wagon was packed with what was left of her belongings; all that was left of her thousands of birds was one parakeet.

  Jenny stepped out of her station wagon, kissed Al with tears in her eyes, left Sal her favorite cookie recipe, and prepared to drive away.

  “But, Jenny, who’ll look after you?” Al asked, horrified. “Where’ll I go when Sal is mean to me?” (For nine years he had taken refuge from the snarling Sal in Jenny’s house.)

  “I never thought Sal deserved you,” Jenny said tenderly.

  “But who’ll look after you?” Al repeated. “You know nobody really meant for you to leave; it was just the buzzards that were a little much. We all really love you, honey. Who’ll look after you?”

  “Nobody,” Jenny said. “I’ll just be a loony old woman with a parakeet.”

  Al, usually so quick with a retort, made no retort in this insta
nce—he just fiddled with the ignition key of his riding mower, and looked sad.

  “I love you, Al, you’ve been a good neighbor to me,” Jenny said, as she got in her cramped station wagon.

  “But who’ll look after you, Jenny?” Al asked again, dismally.

  Jenny just shrugged and drove away. She looked almost thirty years older than she had looked only nine years earlier when America had first made her acquaintance.

  Al and America were horrified. Jenny’s parting words were nothing anyone in America wanted to hear, at least not in prime time. The thought that Jenny Sondstrom, a lovely, spirited woman, the Mother Teresa of birds, more or less, was now an aging bag lady, left to wander the streets with her one parakeet, was a thought that no one welcomed. The network certainly didn’t welcome it; they pleaded with me for weeks to let Joe return, sweep Jenny off her feet, and make her secure in her old age. Sal didn’t welcome it, either; she spent almost a whole episode staring into her mirror, wondering if such a sad fate would overtake her too. Sal, whose eloquent soliloquies with her mirror—about Al, about sex, about the pangs of marriage, marriage and child-rearing—entertained the whole civilized world, delivered the most famous TV soliloquy of all, in which she envisioned her own slow decline into bag-ladyism.

  The next week, “Al and Sal” fell out of the top forty for the first time since it had premiered; six episodes later it closed for good.

  21

  I didn’t really want to talk to Kendall, the man who hated the Panhandle, nor did I feel like giving him one of my hundred-dollar bills, so I merely copied down the addresses of the three Mr. Burgers, got back in my Cadillac, and drifted north on Heights Boulevard, known simply as “the Boulevard” to people who had grown up in Houston in the thirties and forties.