Austin Nights

by Herocious

eyes, takes a deep breath, and reminds me, “If you get tired, Viejo, pull over.”

  “I will, Love.”

  Outside the cones of headlight, the road is desolately dark. I look in my side mirrors and see no signs of life, only the muted red of my taillights.

  I look ahead of me and see white lasers being gobbled up at 85 miles per hour.

  I pass on the left and cruise on the right.

  I sip on the most refreshing orange juice in the world.

  On dark stretches of interstate, I flick on the high beams to better see the pitch-black nooks in the forest that brackets the road. This is my way of saving deer, and Jon’s ride.

  CHANGE ENGINE OIL

  With the AC off and both windows mostly rolled up once we left Florida, the Chevy is getting 19.12 mpg. We expected 20. We aren’t far off the mark.

  I have the radio tuned into a station that played Carlos Vives and left me jonesing for more vallenato. The constellations look big in the sky, especially Orion, which hunts bear directly above I-10 West.

  No shooting stars. No swerving cars. No rain. No fog. No bumps on the road. No ice on bridges. No snow. No cold. No traffic. No roadwork. The perfect night for driving, for making time and thinking about how great it is to be alive and moving west.

  When we reach the Texas state line, the friendly slanted Lone Star illuminated from the ground up with eerie black lights greets us.

  Howdy.

  Bridget opens her eyes and asks if we can stop.

  “I haven’t been able to sleep at all,” she says. “I need to lie down. I’m delirious.” She looks at my bottom lip, “And I don’t want you driving anymore, Viejo.”

  “Okay,” I say, “we can pull over and sleep here.”

  This is the first time we’ve ever slept at the I-10 Texas Welcome Center, but I’m tired at this point, and the promise of spooning Bridget’s body makes driving tedious.

  It’s six minutes past 6AM.

  9

  I like the way clothes look drying outside in the breeze. Seeing them hanging on our balcony on this warm and sunny spring day in Austin is something new for me. I‘ve never dried my clothes outside. There are poor families in Miami still using clotheslines, big poor families with grandparents and uncles and aunts living under one roof. I know hanging my clothes on the wrought-iron railing isn’t new or foreign in the world, nor is it novel or something to make light of, but rather a serious matter, a living symbol of the line that separates classes.

  But seeing all our shirtsleeves and necks, all our shorts and pants legs, all our towels and our basket of undergarments, hanging on the balcony railing is also highly revealing. We’re too optimistic about the amount of clothes we can stuff inside the commercial dryers in The Oaks laundry room. We’re also too cheap to feed the slot four more quarters for another hour cycle.

  Why buy another hour when all we need is another fifteen minutes? Maybe we’d pay a quarter more to finish drying our clothes, but not a whole dollar.

  In this case, the sun is the most sensible way to go, seeing as it is so venomous here in central Texas. It might as well be put to use.

  On our way back from the laundry room, we pass by the swimming pool, and a little mongrel dog barks at us from the shade of a Texas tree. I don’t feel anything for this cur. But it does make me think about how many times it has been to the vet, and how much food it has eaten, and I think about if it’s really worth the trouble, this little thing that needs flea medicine every month.

  Surely this creature can’t have a soul. But I know it does. I just have to be heavily intoxicated to feel its existence.

  We’re almost back home, carrying our two baskets of slightly wet clothes, when she comes into view. I’m talking about the crazy girl who lives next door. She’s probably the looniest person in The Oaks, and she doesn’t fall on the pacific side of the spectrum.

  Every day around noon, Bridget tells me to turn off the radio. Then she sneakily opens the kitchen window to better hear the tantrum inside 229. I have no idea what goes down. All I know is this 20-year-old girl mercilessly pounds the shit out of something and screams vulgarities from another planet. I’ve thought about what it is she pounds the shit out of and with what she does the pounding. I know it can’t be the actual wall and it can’t be her own fists she’s using, right?

  Maybe she has a futon mattress she slugs with a wooden baseball bat, or maybe she lowers her shoulder and plows into the back of her couch. Whatever it is, it lasts for around ten minutes, and then it stops. We don’t hear another peep.

  Then comes today, when we’re carrying our two baskets of slightly moist clothes and spot the crazy girl on the threshold of her front door, spinning in place and snapping her fingers.

  She stumbles from dizziness. Her curly brown hair falls down to her earlobes. She is bespectacled and freckled. Bridget and I look warily at each other and climb the stairs to the second floor. Crazy hides behind the door and peeks at us from the dark. Her eyes are spooked, and her mouth is hanging open in a stupor. What kind of meds is she on? You’d never think such a demure thing could work up such a private display of rage.

  There’s a saying around here printed on lots of burnt orange cotton tees:

  KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD

  Crazy and the leprechaun elf are sure doing their part, and they both lurk right around our stomping ground. It’s kind of a disconcerting thing, living in what seems like the epicenter of Austin weirdness. It isn’t like the ghetto. It isn’t dangerous to walk the streets at night. I’m not worried about getting mugged. These people are insane, not criminals. They’re off the chain, unhooked, not cold-blooded.

  They probably have schizophrenia.

  At least that’s Bridget’s best diagnosis. Early-onset schizophrenia is extremely rare. Most people develop symptoms in their 20s. Rather than be born with the mental disorder, or show clear telltales of it when growing up, it’s much more common for college students to unexpectedly have a breakdown one day. The rest of their lives are fierce battles against a multifaceted brain.

  They drop out of college, they stop learning anything constructive, they can’t hold a job, and their lack of accountability makes them dangerous. Some are good about a consistent dosage of medication, which is proven to help their condition, even make them functional members of society. But others aren’t good about their meds. Maybe they can’t afford them, or they don’t like the way they make them feel, so they aren’t good about their meds, and they have long spells of misbehavior, like pounding futons with a baseball bat and screaming, or, in the case of the leprechaun elf, sharply turning his eyes away from Bridget and me at the library and side-talking to nobody in particular:

  “Are you looking at my face? Hey, you! Are you looking at this face I have to live with? Every day I look at this face. I can’t do anything about this face. I was born with this face. This face isn’t going to change. You hear me? I’ll buy a gun and fucking kill you. I’ll kill you right here. Don’t test me. I’ll buy a gun and shoot you. I’ll find you on Facebook. You’re like everyone else. You’re on Facebook. I’ll buy a gun and find you on Facebook and fucking shoot you.”

  For some reason, although there are a host of librarians chewing the fat behind the circulation desk, several feet away from the leprechaun elf, not one acknowledges his schizophrenic lapse. It’s impossible no one else hears what this troubled man has to say, but everyone, including Bridget and me, pretends nothing happened.

  In this way, the leprechaun elf zips his backpack with all of his earthly trappings and saunters out the door into the balmy night. Who he was addressing in his deranged monologue, I hope to never know.

  But when Bridget and I leave the library right at 9PM, which is when the Twin Oaks Public Library closes, we see the leprechaun elf circling the bus stop, muttering obscenities under the menacing light of a street lamp. I lightly touch Bridget’s elbow and point to an alternative route through the desolate parking lot away from the bus stop. If he’s watching us
to see what direction we go, once we enter the walkway to a strip mall, he’ll only know we live somewhere south of the library.

  Still, I can’t help but wonder how much longer our address will remain a mystery.

  5

  On our way out, I ask Bridget, “Where’s the bass coming from?” She says, “Some ghetto girl’s ride.” We leave our second floor apartment, and from the landing I see a car double parked with four windows down and the trunk popped. The bass is more offensive outside. My head doesn’t want to bob to the beat of radio rap.

  “Hey there!” shouts a large woman carrying two paper grocery bags, one cradled in each arm, “how y’all doing? You guys moved in after her and her baby boy left, right? Yeah, I saw her around some, but she kept to herself a lot. By the way, I’m Gloria, nice to meet y’all. Me and my husband, we lived here nine years. We live,” she points above us, “right on top of your heads!”

  I try to continue the thread, but Gloria doesn’t hear me. Listening to booty bass in her car has made her loud and deaf. It’s only natural. But I can tell she has a good heart and means no harm.

  “How many years have they lived here?” asks Bridget.

  We’re walking to Cumberland Rd, en route to a local coffee shop on South 1st St known for growing its own beans on a farm just outside Austin.

  “Nine,” I say.

  “Did she mean here in The Oaks,” wonders Bridget, “or