The Man With Candy (3 page)

Unemployment is low, especially among skilled laborers and artisans, and the workingman makes enough money to live comfortably. His immediate superiors, the foremen and managers and supervisors, move into tony areas like Memorial and Tanglewood, sometimes buying more than they can afford, falling for real-estate come-ons designed to appeal to their competitive natures (“Your subordinates cannot afford to live here”). The oil rich wallow in their oil riches, increasing every year.

One Houston millionaire bought a hotel and assigned his wife to redo it, thus indulging her taste for interior decoration on a grand scale; he built public fountains and named them after himself, and he stocked his ranch with exotic game and rode to the hunt on half-tracks with machine guns. A Houston woman reported the theft of a mink coat—from her pickup truck. A furrier who knew the tastes of his rich customers sent out a letter: “I am taking bids from several people on a mink bedspread…. The
bidding will start at ten thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in Texas, or at twenty-five thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in existence.” Roy Hofheinz, creator of the Astrodome and former Houston mayor, said he thought he had made his first million by the time he was forty, but he was unable to pinpoint the date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” Hofheinz said. Not in Houston.

This emphasis on the stockpiling of money has not always left time and energy for community planning, for human problems and sharings and mutuality. Forty-three years ago, Houstonians were advised by hired consultants to decide whether they were “building a great city or merely a great population.” The city fathers opted for population, for economic growth, for more and more residents with more and more spending power. Through the years, any regulations that would inhibit the dollar flow have been summarily rejected. Thus Houston finds itself in 1973 with no zoning laws. If a man wants to set up a chili stand next to a monastery or shooting gallery by an old folks’ home, no zoning law can stop him. The attitude toward public advertising is equally laissez-faire; despite the proximity of Lady Bird Johnson’s aerie to the west, Houston has never been able to enact reasonable billboard control and the approaches to the city affront and assault the eye. City politicians have been slow to pass laws restricting real-estate development, and housing codes are paper tigers.

“My very first impression of Houston,” said a Purdue professor in 1966, “was that this is not a city for pedestrians. It was built for people on wheels. The pedestrian here is a nonentity….” Daily some 1.3 million cars move about and through and over and under the city, traveling nearly 30 million passenger-miles on five thousand miles of paved streets and freeways. Hydrocarbons and lead oxides and other noxious fumes blend with the aroma of the petrochemical industry, and almost every afternoon a death cap of fouled air plops down upon the city. The Gulf humidity
holds the chemicals in suspension and there are frequent “air stagnation advisories.” Once signs were posted at the city limits: “Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.” They were the work of the Harris County Pollution Control Board, fighting another losing skirmish with industrial boosters and boomers.

Houston’s nickname, “The Bayou City,” suggests a sublime region of slow-moving streams shaded by majestic trees, a Texas version of Seurat’s
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte,
but most of the bayous were lined with concrete years ago and have all the sylvan charm of the Harlem River. Buffalo Bayou, once “a most enchanting little stream,” was deepened and broadened into the Houston Ship Channel, described a few years ago by a federal pollution commissioner as “one of the worst polluted bodies of water in the nation. In fact, on almost any day this channel may be the most badly polluted body of water in the entire world.” Houstonians shrugged, and went on making money. As an astute Houston
Post
editor, George Fuermann, wrote: “[Houston’s leaders] almost always do manage, as they would say, ‘to get the job done.’ It has been our misfortune that most of the jobs they choose to get done are material; few are altruistic or humanitarian or even, in the larger sense, community.” While Astrodomes and Astrohalls and Astroworlds are rushed to completion, undernourished blacks and overnourished rats battle each other for survival in the fourth ward, just across Interstate 45 from downtown. The rats are ahead.

The West begins two hundred miles away in San Antonio. Houston is the South; its settlers were of the same pioneering stock that built Atlanta and Tallahassee and Birmingham, and Houston was the capital of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department. Camellias and oleanders are rampant, crape myrtle and black willow abound, and corn whiskey is still highly prized, whether as country-brewed “white lightning” in Mason jars or fancified sourmash
bourbon in heirloom bottles. Constant trafficking with northern and eastern businessmen has converted many Houstonians to Scotch, a liquor that comes conveniently up the ship channel, directly from Clydeside. Beer is the beverage of Houston’s blue-collar workers; it flows out of four major breweries that sometimes fall behind demand, setting off clamors and cries that an industry so basic to the people’s needs should be more responsible. Local experts have claimed, in perfect seriousness, that in summers of particular drought more beer is consumed in Houston than water.

The people are young, befitting a growing area. The median age is 27.5, contrasted with 35 for New York. Anglo-Saxon whites predominate, but Houston has also experienced infusions of ethnic groups-Germans and Czechs and Poles from the old country and from American ghettos, Cajuns from Louisiana, Indians from the Southwest, Mexicans from Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Coahuila, blacks from the cotton country. Most of the ethnics have been thoroughly assimilated into the city’s life. The blacks and Mexicans, like Faulkner’s Dilsey, endure.

In matters of dress and personal style, the people keep watch on Dallas, which in turn looks to other big cities like New York and Paris. There is a lag and Houston is sometimes a turn or two out of phase with the self-appointed satraps of fashion. One sees women strapped into old-fashioned uplift brassières that shove their breasts forward like stilettos. Businessmen wear loudly contrasting outfits accented by chalk-white belts and shiny white patent-leather shoes, and in off-hours climb into one-piece jump suits in imitation of the city’s social monarchs, the astronauts.

Houston has never pretended to be a center of style or design, nor is it historically renowned for contributions to literature or the arts. Traditionally it has been a workingman’s town, too busy to be bothered by the airy conceits of culture. Beleaguered local literati are quick to note that O. Henry lived in Houston (for eight months in the 1890’s); except for him, The Bayou City cannot point to a
single homebred creative artist of note. But one hears repeatedly that Howard Hughes was born in Houston and that the Hughes Tool Company, keystone of his antic financial kingdom, remains in the city. As in all matters local, commerce is ascendant.

The spoken language tends toward unabashed polyglot, the general dialect falling loosely within the boundaries of southern speech, but with distinct peculiarities of sound and usage. Way is pronounced why; horse becomes harse; and car, core. Slender sounds like sunder, laugh is pronounced life, and grass is grace or grice. Words like heights and like and store are split asunder (haw-eets, law-eek, stow-er), and there are genuine relic usages such as aks for ask, traceable to the Old English verb acsian or aksian. A ghostly
r
comes out of nowhere and slips into words like swallow, pronounced swaller, or is shifted around in words like the four-syllable Pedernales, which becomes the two-syllable Perdnails, or is dropped entirely from words like very, often pronounced ve’y. A dialect dividing line runs from Freeport, on the Gulf Coast, northwest toward Amarillo; the line roughly separates the area of hill-country cowboy pronunciation from the area of the distinctive East Texas rural accent, and it pierces the very innards of Houston, so that both dialects are heard, sometimes from the same speaker, with overtones of Cajun French that came up the bayou from Louisiana. One also encounters remnants of Texas German, Texas Spanish (sometimes called Tex-Mex), Texas Czech and Polish and Ukrainian, all reminders of the city’s deep ethnicity. A waitress commands her customers at the end of a meal, “Y’all vill pleece come back!
Heah?
” Newly transplanted from Germany, she works in a French restaurant that serves spaghetti Bolognese, not far from a Japanese restaurant that pushes Saint-Emilion and Liebfraumilch with the teppan-yaki. In matters nationalistic, Houston is relaxed.

Mythology and Shakespeare hold that murder will out, but the statement has never been absolutely true, and certainly not in
Houston. Violence is as much a part of the city’s heritage as the post oaks and the bayous. When it was a tiny frontier town, Houston was described by a diarist as “the greatest sink of disipation [sic] and vice that modern times have known.” An early diplomat wrote: “I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town during my stay on the coast committed there, than throughout the whole of Texas.” A bishop proclaimed in 1843 that “there is a great need for a deep, a thorough, a sweeping revival of religion in Houston,” and more than a century later Billy Graham, wielding his customary theological meat ax, warned Houstonians that most of them “will spend an eternity in hell.”

The specialty was homicide, no undeveloped art in any part of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the top of a tower and killed fourteen in little more than an hour, where Lee Harvey Oswald sniped John F. Kennedy, and where Jack Ruby, in turn, slew Oswald in front of a paralyzed assemblage of police officers.

In 1957, Houston had the highest per capita murder rate in the United States, earning the cognomen “The Murder City,” and it has never been far out of contention. In 1966, there were five dozen more victims in Houston than in all of England. In a typical year, Houston doubles London’s total number of murders, and London is six times as large and far more densely populated. In his definitive book
Houston: The Once and Future City,
^*
George Fuermann recounts a popular limerick:

In Houston we feel no aversion
When others are casting aspersion;
We never mind much
The murders and such—
We take them as week-end diversion.

Some blamed an inconsistent and woolly Texas penal code, some the lingering effects of the frontier tradition, some the public’s insistence on private weaponry. Most Houstonians were too enmeshed
in business to waste time theorizing about the minor matter of murder. Since a mere three hundred or so were killed each year, and most of them black, the mass of citizenry went its way unperturbed, and newspaper editorials on the subject served mainly for the wrapping of fish. “Public indifference to the homicide toll lets murder stalk the community unhindered—and with implied public acceptance,” the Houston
Post
trumpeted in a 1967 editorial that might have been written in the days of Billy the Kid and the James gang. “The public is silent. There is no outcry against murder. And silence gives consent.”

Houston’s city fathers believed that the best government is the least government, and the embarrassing murder rate had never become a priority item. Houston was growing so fast that all its municipal services continually trailed its practical needs, and the city struggled along with twenty-two hundred policemen, about half the number needed to secure so large and hectic a metropolis. The harassed policemen were underpaid; most of them were forced to hold outside jobs that occupy time and attention, and as one of them put it, “Everybody owes the credit union.” Not surprisingly, there was difficulty in recruiting, and the force remained permanently understaffed, while major crime rates rose year after year. Millions of dollars of federal cash were available to ameliorate such urban predicaments, but Police Chief Herman Short
^*
scorned the handout. “I get sick and tired of people acting like that all you have to do to solve a problem is throw a bunch of federal money at it,” the chief declared. An archconservative who was politically close to Governor George Wallace of Alabama, Herman Short looked with suspicion on any federal assistance, and in the meantime his police department bungled the job. In 1973, Houston led American cities in number of suspects shot and killed by policemen, a figure generally reflective of poor discipline and attitude. Chief Short was fond of making bellicose statements (“When someone pulls a pistol on
a policeman, he’d better be ready to die!”), which the less astute of his officers interpreted, at times of stress, as a mandate to fire at anything that moves or dissents. Human life was never the city’s most precious commodity.

Short was proud of his anti-riot procedures, his special unit for ferreting out subversives and radicals, his armory of machine guns and bulletproof war wagons and other hardware, but his department had hardly any community relations programs and was woefully deficient in that most basic of all police services: the cop on the beat. “We have so few men in uniform,” said a police official, “that a lot of crimes go undetected or uninvestigated.” Houston policemen had such morale-shattering case loads that some of them shunned their work altogether, a not unusual human reaction. Around police headquarters, a game was made of getting away early, slipping off to run a personal errand or shoot a round of golf, and otherwise beating the system that paid so little and demanded so much. It was not a matter of the men corrupting the system. No one can put his heart into a hopeless task day after day, and the job of policing Houston’s 1.3 million people with twenty-two hundred men was plainly hopeless.

Every Houston policeman developed a built-in inclination to avoid difficult situations, to iron out malfeasances painlessly, to do anything to avoid the dreaded paper work and the unbearable court appearances. Even the best detectives, the ones who head promotion lists and have the proudest records, were forced to take refuge in technicalities. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t search for runaways.” “Your husband beat you up? Well, come on in and sign a complaint.” The bare minimum of the law was enforced. A fuming lieutenant ordered his men to make no fewer than two arrests a day; patrolling a hundred and eighty square miles of turbulent southwest Houston with twenty cars, they had spent most of their time enjoying the scenery. They had given up.