A Small Town for Its Size: (A Novel, or Two)

By David Collins

Stifled by their upbringing in small-town Texas, Chaz and Kat yearn for escape, for a chance to explore other ways of thinking, being, dreaming. Sadly, their trajectories carry them to separate states and entirely different career paths. When they reunite ten years later in the tidepools of Houston's underground, there's not enough space in Space City to rebuild their abandoned relationship. But there's no harm in tryingor is there? Follow the wandering thoughts of sleepy, introspective engineer Chaz, and the wry insights of insatiable, insomniac performance artist Kat as they pry at the strands of love's Gordian Knot. Sail the turbulent waters of the Houston art scene. Sop up the cultural gumbo of the Texas Gulf Coast. Straddle the meridians of desire and necessity, art and science, male and female, urban and pastoral, freedom and responsibility, classical wisdom and new pragmatismalways in conflict, always seeking reconciliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 23, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469740836

David Collins

David Collins is a local government officer and a teacher. He and Gareth Bennett are die-hard Cardiff City fans and the authors of two quiz books on the Bluebirds. He has written extensively on Welsh soccer and Cardiff City and is a regular pundit on GTFM's Cardiff City phone-in.

Book preview

A Small Town for Its Size

a novel (or two)

David B. Collins

Writers Club Press

San Jose · New York · Lincoln · Shanghai

A Small Town for Its Size

a novel (or two)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Whiteoak Telepress

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Writers Club Press,

an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

620 North 48th Street Suite 201

Lincoln, NE 68504-3467

www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-09016-8

ISBN: 978-1-4697-4083-6 (eBook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION

I

BETWEEN MADRID AND MARSEILLES

II

TORINO

III

LISBOA

IV

WEST OF TUNIS EN ROUTE TO ALGIERS

V

BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA AND CAIRO

VI

SALONICA

VII

ATHENAI

VIII

MYCENAE

IX

PALERMO

X

BETWEEN BRINDISI AND NAPOLI

XI

BETWEEN FEZ AND CASABLANCA

XII

SALAMANCA

XIII

BETWEEN NANTES AND LYON

XIV

VENEZIA

XV

NAPOLI

XVI

NAPOLI (STILL)

XVII

LJUBLJANA

XVIII

MYKONOS

XIX

CADÍZ

XX

CONSTANTINOPLE

XXI

ANKARA

XXII

VALLETTA

XXIII

MARRAKECH

XXIV

TENEDOS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A Little Background Information

First, allow me to make the dedications here. There are too many people deserving of gratitude to allow me to construct a proper and dignified dedications page. The family comes first—they don’t understand me, but they put up with this habit of mine; then my longtime confidante and part-time editor Christine Kestner; followed by Rebekah French the dancing barista who unwittingly inspired me to finish this work.

Behind them stands everyone who has participated in the Houston underground art/music/peace/justice scene in whatever capacity. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Houston, but of all the truly alternative crowds I’ve witnessed in the U.S., Space City has the one with the most on the ball. When you get here, try to see a play put on by Infernal Bridegroom Productions, a Rusted Shut or Walking Time Bombs gig, or the Art Car Parade in April. Mostly it’s the judicious use of anger that sets Houston apart: not just anger about relationships gone wrong and parents with Fascistic tendencies, but about the real enemies, the architects of a corporatist culture that makes it nearly impossible for us to have real relationships. With anyone.

And that, if anything, is what this bucket o’ words is about: two people who more than anything in the world would like to connect on every plane of existence, but who know that it’s impossible. They don’t know why it’s impossible, but they think it has something to do with the inability to synchronize their desires. They are always wanting more because there is so much more in the world to want. Think of someone you may have gone out with once or twice who couldn’t look directly into your eyes, for whatever reason: The X Files was playing on the TV over the bar, there was a slammin’ blonde in a tube-top at the next table, or maybe this person just had been discouraged from making eye contact since childhood. The pair presented in this work have trouble seeing each other through their respective third eyes.

Behind them stand the beauty and the desolation of an urban landscape in the 1990s, and a Downtown arts co-op peopled by those who try either to decorate the landscape with their handiworks or use their creative inspiration to reveal the ugliness and spiritual poverty behind America’s superficial prosperity.

I

In a moment of reflection, I realized that Kat was a human analog of the city of Houston. A lot of people would consider that realization insulting, because Houston is not everyone’s idea of Paradise. In fact, it’s more like the place to escape to when you’ve had enough of Paradise. But it’s a city, a metropolitan sprawl, and an attitude that has, as its underlying directive, turning lifestyles into high art.

Consider the Houston that only insiders know: its rich multi-ethnic heritage, its redneck tradition, its progressive sophistication (real or imagined), the love affair with the latest tools and gadgets, the intensity with which it works and plays, the gentility with which it approaches the arts, the moderation and restraint visible even at its dressiest (especially compared to Dallas). It a nutshell, that was Kat. Houston is still there, right where I left it. But Kat is gone. Real gone.

As to where Kat is now, I have only a few hypotheses. She may be dead, but she hasn’t bothered to notify me, and I never received a handbill in the mail advertising her impending extinction. If still alive, she probably has a small loft apartment in some scaffold-choked city in Europe, or maybe a cabin on a beach on one of the Lesser Antilles, or maybe she lives on a farm in upstate New York, where the snow is allowed to lie unmolested by plows for most of the winter. The snow in the Northeast really impressed her when she first visited there.

When Kat and I were juniors at Sealy High School, we were the uncoolest bipeds for miles. Sealy, about fifty miles west of downtown Houston, is about as small-town-America as small-town-America can get. The high school scene was very wholesome by day, but the seamy side of Sealy came out at night: the mixture of testosterone and alcohol led to the expected weekend activities of fighting, drunk driving accidents, date rape, and football games. Though Kat and I grew up in Sealy, we never identified with any of that. If the truth be told, we didn’t identify with much of anything in our immediate environment.

We weren’t jocks, or cheerleaders, or in the band (though I had my saxophone still from my two years in middle school band), we weren’t jellyheads who stashed reefers in our lockers, we didn’t even sign up for Future Farmers of America. But we had read and seen the film of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and decided that it was the funniest, most accurate story we’d ever consumed. Truth is generally a lot funnier than fiction, and sometimes, in the right hands, fiction becomes truer than truth.

We also didn’t go out together very much, with neither of us having much access to vehicular transportation. Both of us rode on a bus to school every day straight through senior year—serious uncoolage. That lack of social gadding didn’t bother us much, since, we figured, what killed most teenage relationships was too much togetherness. Seeing each other every day at lunch and in classes was enough; the occasional big night on the town was a bonus.

It’s also notable how very few people even suspected that Kat and I were anything beyond the friendship stage, a perception that we fostered with our own lack of amorous behavior. There was no clinging, no handholding, no quick smooching at the classroom door, no surreptitious correspondence during filmstrips. If we walked through the school together, we were like an Amish couple, disdaining physical contact, scowling with disapproval at everything around us.

When we decided it was time to try that sex thing about which we’d heard so much, it was a mutual and mute decision. Our eyes and our body language proclaimed our readiness, as we lay on a blanket on the grass in Houston’s Memorial Park beneath a full moon near the truck that I had borrowed from a friend named Calvin Hooks. Of course our maiden voyage across that great Line of Demarcation between thought and action was a disaster, but in private moments we could laugh about it later. We got better and better at it, more willing to experiment and do some supplemental reading on the subject. We also got better at the logistics of quickies when parents were away, which happened about twice a month.

While there was nothing extraordinary about two teens enjoying the occasional tryst, the emotional side of the relationship was, well, odd, especially by Sealy’s standards. It wasn’t all hearts and flowers and misspelled luv. Certainly there was the affection that two comrades with a common purpose feel, and our common purpose was simple: the art of fucking.

Yes, there’s that nasty word again: art.

Perhaps it was because Kat was never exposed to fairy tales as she grew straight and tall on her daddy’s mini-ranch, but she never entertained any illusions of happily ever after. That was cool with me, because I never entertained any such illusions myself. It was futile to dream of perpetual luv and happiness. We didn’t get this cynical by watching our parents break up, since both hers and mine managed to buck the odds and stay together. Heckfire, we sometimes wished our parents would split up, so we might have a hook on which to hang our alienation. But no, quick learners that we were, we grasped from watching our peers that together forever translated into an average of three months.

In fact, we kept statistics, a quite feasible activity in a small school when one has no other pressing activities.

Hugh Kimball and Mary Lynn Abercrombie officially are Splitsville today.

Damn! I had such high hopes for them…committing suicide together. When did they first hook up?

I would look in my special spiral notebook on the K page or the A page—cross-indexing, dontcha know—My records say, uh, November 21…at the Homecoming dance.

Four months to the day. Wow. That’s a record for both of them. Chances of a reconciliation? Kat’s inquiring mind had to know.

Nil. He found out she’d gone out with a cousin of his in Bellville, whose guts he hates. Icing on the cake: Apparently she’s blown this cousin on more than one occasion. But that’s just a rumor.

’Course it is. Nobody has oral sex in Austin County, Texas. She let the references to icing and blowjobs in the same sentence go by unremarked.

Not without our permission, that is.

On that particular occasion, we were seniors, naked and post-coital, with the luxury of a few hours on the most gorgeous March 21 I’d ever seen. I closed the spiral and proceeded to nuzzle Kat’s crotch, sniffing her like a predator with exclusive rights to the kill. We had the patent on oral sex in Austin County.

If I hadn’t brought up Hugh and Mary Lynn, what Kat said next might not have come out that day. It could have been Chaz, I’m pregnant or Chaz, I’m having my period or Chaz, I think we should get married or Chaz, let’s go to a Catholic Mass this Sunday. But it wasn’t any of those.

Chaz, I’ve applied to some art schools in the Northeast. She didn’t mean Texarkana.

I looked around the room at her drawings, paintings, and small clay sculptures that cluttered her room. They were good, mostly, with an obviously perceptive and introspective spirit behind them. But I got a kick out of telling her how much they sucked. You’re gonna do this shit for a living?

Fuck you! she giggled, glaring at me through her skinny, winter-pale legs. She clenched my head between her thighs. "I’m gonna learn how to do better shit than this. What can you do hangin’ around Sealy when you wanna be a real artist, y’know? Not the kind that sells cutesy birdhouses at the craft shows. The kind that changes the way people look at the world."

Couldn’t you learn that hangin’ around, say, Houston or Austin?

If I can’t get into one of the schools back east, I’ll try one of the schools in Houston or Austin. She unclenched and pushed my head back with her bare left foot. But my first priority is getting into RISD or one of the Boston schools—or Pratt Institute in Brooklyn if I can swing it.

I began rooting for Pratt, since New York is a few hundred miles closer to home than Providence or Boston, though still several worlds away. Farewell, comrade.

Suddenly I felt ripped off. She was absconding with the remnants of our quiet revolution, with her creativity and wit, with her delicious self. Now I’d have to find someone else with whom to work through the Kama Sutra. Presumably that would be easy in Austin, where I was planning to spend the next phase of my education at the Humongoversity—but could I find someone so singularly splendid as Katerina Pedraza? Betrayal! She was planning to leave Texas behind with me in it, me feeling like the only subversive bull in a pasture full of docile steers. Well, alcoholic, dick-brained, Baptist, football-mad steers.

It was so strange, after sixteen months of hanging out together and ten months of occasional scrumping, to look at her and have no desire to plow her fields, yet discover how much I would miss her once we parted company. Our interaction over the next two months just consisted of talking together, at lunch and over the phone some evenings, about classes, TV shows, politics, and classmates we despised. The topics of sex and other students’ luv lives were understood to be forbidden ground.

Except—and there are always exceptions, even to the rule that there are always exceptions—she did ask me to be her prom date, and I reluctantly accepted. She explained that she had the right to ask because it was a leap year (1984), and I insisted that chronology had nothing to do with it where I was concerned. That Saturday, May 5, 1984, was the only evening on which we appeared in public together between the spring equinox and graduation.

It took quite a few of the attendees of the senior-junior prom a few good hard squints to figure out who my date was.

In high school, Kat was normally as unadorned as the pines that ranchers had planted as breakwinds in the Hill Country of Texas, pines which, like Kat, had no business thriving in that climate but managed to take root and grow anyway. Like the pines, Kat had grown to an astonishing height: She stood not quite six feet tall, though she walked with a diffidence that made her seem shorter. She was lean like those pines, too. Her hair was always early-’70s long and straight, kept clean and brushed but an unflattering dark brunette shade that split the difference between her father’s Mexican black and her mother’s Bohemian sandy brown. Her eyes were deep Aztec brown, but narrow and Euro-shaped like her mother’s, giving the orbs little space to show off. Her facial features were unremarkable from any angle, and she seldom wore cosmetics of any kind. Plain blouses, jeans of different colors, and canvas high-tops made up 90% of her apparel. She preferred to decorate the world around her, not herself.

But at the prom she outdid herself. While I wore a simple, white and black, rented tuxedo and a pair of shiny, black, patent leather post-disco shoes—and my favorite Clash button in lieu of a boutonnière—HELLO! she was both an exemplar and a satire of Texan young-womanhood.

When I went to pick her up at the ranchito with a couple of classmates with whom we were on friendly terms—and with whom we had snickered at my pop-up edition of the Kama Sutra that I had purchased on a trip to Houston—Kat was, of course, not ready. Her sister Morgan, a stylist working in Round Rock, was helping her dress and groom in the back portion of the house. Mother Marie Pedraza had iced tea and lemonade ready, though. As I sipped my tea, I wondered how much Mrs. Pedraza knew about Kat and me. Mr. P. couldn’t have known much: I was still very much alive.

Brad Allen and Missy Holmquist were not an item really: They had sat next to each other in the symphonic band’s bassoon section for three years and managed to remain friends. Between sips of lemonade, they giggled nervously about what post-prom activities some of their friends had planned. Kat and I had planned, well, nothing. She’s not into planning, I told them. Things always manage to interfere with plans. She says that’s what keeps life from boring her to death, living unplanned. They giggled some more.

With a bit of fanfare from Morgan, it proceeded through the French doors from the rear corridor into the living room where we sat. It was Kat’s latest work of art: herself. She wore a stunning, very expensive, black and red, strapless sequined gown, with a shawl, a string of oversized faux pearls, ridiculously high-heeled pumps, and the crowning touch, BIG hair. Morgan had dyed that used-motor-oil-brown hair into a shimmering platinum shade, given it red highlights, teased and permed the hell out of it, and piled it up on top of Kat’s head so that it looked like three times the usual volume of hair. Then Morgan must have used a trowel to apply the Mary Kay cosmetics—not to the point of resembling a harlot, but more like a Dallas society matron.

I’d heard that only drag queens could look so alluring. For Kat, I guess this was a form of drag. Let’s not forget the extra padding that she had discreetly sewn into the bosom of the gown to enhance her own short-changed chest.

At the prom, Kat was not her usual reticent self. She mutated into Ultra-Date: speaking with an affected drawl, flitting from couple to couple, swapping beauty tips….

Now, me, when Ah go to bed, I just take some o’ that-there Arm & Hammer bakin’ soda, lay it out in lines just like cocaine, and whiff it raht up ma nose! Ye-es! What it duz, y’see, is it starts t’ circulatin’ around in your blood, and b’lieve me, it cleans them blood vessels raht ay-out! Honey, when ya got clean blood vessels, ya got clean pores and a nahce, rosy glow. Oh, ’scuse me, there’s Veronique, gotta say howdy to her. Veronique, dahrlin’!

It was her first performance piece. She had never even heard the phrase performance art, but there she was, doing it the way Minerva herself intended. Eventually I had to command her to shut up and dance, even though the music ranged from country to Southern rock, and neither of us knew a two-step from a twelve-step. We danced as creative individuals dance: make it up as you go.

Brad and Missy, embarrassed by the whole show, conveniently forgot to give us a ride home from the school gym; we had to hitch a ride back to her side of town in the back of a farmer’s pick-up. I enjoyed the prom more than I’d ever expected to, and it didn’t even culminate in a make-out session. After a brief, friendly kiss on the porch, she went in to bed, and I slept on some hay in the barn, which anyone who has tried it can tell you is not easy, but as I was pretty damn tuckered out I managed.

While drifting off, I smiled to myself, understanding fully that Kat needed to get out of Texas, at least for a while, to develop her talent, and that once in a while Northerners needed to be reminded that not every Texan woman is like it.

A

Between Madrid and Marseilles

That phase of my life is over.

I call it my Chaz period, which you may think is odd, since I’ve named it in honor of the person whom I would least like to see. I’ve heard third-hand that you’re trying to chronicle the events that led up to my disappearance. All you can do is try; you’re no Marcel bloody Proust.

Aaack. That’s awfully harsh, that previous paragraph, but I stand by it. Don’t think my feelings toward you are that bitter. Au contraire; part of me still loves you deeply. But if you should ever discover where I evaporated to from your world without dropping a single breadcrumb behind me, you’ll hear it from a third party, since it’s unlikely that you’ll think to look for me in—

Why should I tell you where? It would spoil the surprise—and you might do something rashly romantic like come looking for me. I do have a regular home, but I spend a lot of time traveling, so even though this part of the world looks small on the map, you could spend a lifetime not finding me. All this time on trains gives me plenty of time to write, and I’ve decided it’s about time I wrote something to you. You deserve an explanation, no matter how difficult it may be for both of us.

Back to the subject of your writing talent: You can execute a good paragraph, you have a keen ear for wordplay, and you can keep the narrative progressing. But I know from reading your earlier attempts that your sense of detail is limited, and what details you force into your descriptions are frequently inaccurate. Your worst sin, however, is that you miss out on what’s truly important.

Oops—that’s also unfair. Your sense of what is truly important is, let’s say, very different from mine. It may be a function of gender, but I hope not. So since you’re bound to prioritize events and details differently, I demand equal space, but only because I agree with you that it’s a story worth telling.

Word of warning: With me, you get stream of consciousness. I don’t go back and edit much. I correct myself, mollify, but retain the original unfiltered thought on the page. When in Beat City, do as the Beats do. (There’s a clue for you!) Of course, there were damned few female Beat Generation writers that actually got published; more’s the pity, when you consider what the women had to put up with. Also, just to put you on notice, though a lot of what I’m about to spill is old news, some of it I’ve kept from you, not out of embarrassment or shame, but to protect you from the knowledge. That’s my worst sin: trying to keep you in the dark about aspects of my life and letting you keep me on that pedestal of virtue.

What’s important in the life of Katerina Pedraza? I’ve been raped. Three times, twice successfully. If it’s true that 50% of U.S. women are sexually assaulted at least once in their lives, I could be three women—and, it could be said, I am three women, a dimension of my personality that my old friend Charles E. Wheelwright, IV, never recognized. There’s Kat the Artist, Kat the Country Girl, and the version of Katerina that I’ve become now, still containing and embodying the other two.

Having been raped doesn’t define me as a person; sure as fuck doesn’t make me a victim (as I have chosen never to be a victim); and, unlike a lot of women, doesn’t lead me to despise the males of my species. Actually, there are many men and few women whom I care to be around, but the society that produces men who feel (not think) that sexual violence is acceptable is a sick, sorry society at best.

I give the men who attacked me a lot of credit: I’ve never been easy to pin down, and none of them did what happens to a lot of rape targets. I never got punched, slashed, stabbed, pistol-whipped, sodomized with durable goods, or otherwise tortured and mutilated. When the 9-mm barrel touched my brow, though, on the last go-round, well, sorry, John Lennon, but happiness is a gun that stays cold.

Chaz, you’re probably saving a description of the rape for some climactic event toward the end. Sick bastard! Imagine using my suffering (well, yours as well) to advance the cause of your narrative! Yes, Chaz, you were there—in the role of Bystander Scared Shitless. Briefly stated, one acquaintance of mine and four of his homeboys got the drop on us in the wrong section of Pasadena after dark. It was a long ordeal of cocks and Glocks, which everybody survived, and which my relationship with you did not survive. Film at 11:00, as they say.

Something else I should tell you, which you may have known and chosen to ignore: I took drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. The anti-depressants, Xanax mostly, my parents paid for. The marijuana, hashish, mandrex, crystal methedrine, peyote, psilocybin, LSD in a variety of flavors, MDMA, and occasional powder cocaine were usually free or cheaply bought through the courtesy of friends. Of all those substances, the hardest to kick was the Xanax, but I’ve managed.

Unlike the rapes, I believe the drugs did define my personality. When in New York one summer, I got turned on to MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy. Before: a mousy, small-town cynic. After: a totally fabulous, urbane, chummy artiste with a smile that wouldn’t quit—literally. Three hits left me smiling for a whole week. My facial muscles hurt from grinning, but I couldn’t stop. When I finally came down, I decided that I was in love with the world despite its abundant ugliness. Yee-haw!

I’m still in love with the world. With all the shit that the world has thrown at me, it’s mostly been a pleasant and comfortable ride.

I’m still in love with Houston. I don’t think I could ever explain it, but I never felt more at home in any other place.

I’m still in love with you, Chaz. The best writer in the world could never distill the essence of that love in a single, glib sentence. Like the world, it is simply too complex to boil down to its component elements.

So here’s the long version. I’ve organized it into 24 letters to you, which I’ll mail from 24 different cities. One letter for each letter in the Greek alphabet, for each book in a Homeric epic, for each hour of the day a random thought of you might drift into my head.

You beat me. In that eighth grade spelling bee, you beat me. I had never lost a spelling bee up till then, seldom scored less than 100 on a spelling test, back when spelling still mattered. I goofed on the word meretricious after 36 rounds of matching you spell for spell, which happened after the field narrowed to just you and me. I assumed that the word had something to do with merit and was spelled meritricious, but you either knew better or guessed luckily, winning the bee. Buzz-buzz.

My resentment of your victory turned quickly to respect. In eighth grade I had no concept of the dynamics of admiring a person for his spelling prowess, but I intuited that you had an above-average sense of at least the importance of details, even if I could not put that intuition into words. So at lunch one day I congratulated you—it was February 13, 1980—in front of all your lunchmates, who were a few degrees geekier than you. At that point, those six regular lunchmates were the only beings on Earth who called you Chaz.

Chad, I sneaked up from behind you en route to returning my hot-lunch tray. I just wanted to say, ‘Congratulations you’re a helluva speller.’

Thanks, you didn’t even turn around, "that’s very meretricious of you."

The geeks doubled over in their seats and cackled derisively. One of them actually snarfed a bit of chocolate milk through his nose. I didn’t have enough mashed potatoes and gravy left on my plate to bean them all, so I mumbled, Eat shit, and continued on my way.

A bizarre coincidence made you change lunchmates. A week or so later, you and your group had a parting of ways, and so did I with my bestestfriendinthe-wholewideworld Jennifer Stipanovic. I found you sitting alone, as far from the geek table as you could get in that small commons. You were a pale, skinny little wretch with reddish-brown hair that wouldn’t behave, polyester clothes with earth-tone prints that could give one a static shock just looking at them, and always the same pair of white Ken Rosewall tennis shoes.

What happened? I asked.

Well, you know how Paul is kind of into Hitler? Paul Miller was the septet’s unofficial leader. I mean, he’s not, like, a Nazi or a KKK-dude, but he’s just interested in Hitler. Anyways, he said to us yesterday that the Nazis killed queers in the concentration camps, which I already knew; but then he said Hitler had the right idea about queers: gas ’em. I told Paul he was full o’ shit, that killing anybody for what they are is wrong, so he gets the guys to gang up on me, saying that, like, just because I think queers should be allowed to live, I must be one of them.

Are you?

No! Are you?

If I was, would I tell you? I replied, calm as Jackson Lake. I finally sat beside you. "I just broke up with my best friend."

Yeah? How?

I refused to sneak out to go to a keg party that her oldest brother is throwing for her other brother’s 18th birthday. If my dad ever found out I was there, he’d kill me twice.

Think you’ll make up again?

"With Jennifer? I hope not. She’s turning into one of them."

A queer?

No, worse: a T.S.H. You looked at me blankly, so I clarified it. Typical Sealy Hick.

Is that anything like a Typical Bellville Hick, or a Typical Columbus Hick?

Yeah, but different. I explained in the most convenient terms that I was disgusted by the way Jennifer went out of her way to avoid the slightest appearance of individuality among her peers, as if she had successfully passed through the 12-step Nonconformists Anonymous program and was on a mission to stay willfully bland and stupid—one day at a time, of course. Jennifer would soon start attending Sunday services at the correct Baptist Church that most of the high school cheerleaders attended. Stipanovices had been steadfast Roman Catholics since the 15th century, so her parents were less than thrilled by the move.

So you and I hung out together at school, but our paths seldom crossed elsewhere until we got our vehicular mayhem licenses from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Our immediate circle of friends was small and loosely organized, just the way we liked it. Through early high school your dorky ex-lunchmates metamorphosed into either T.S.H.’s or regular guys who confided that they knew Paul had been full of shit all along about his Final Solution rhetoric but were afraid to go against him at the time. Paul himself fell from a top row bleacher seat and choked to death on a big wad of Copenhagen snuff at the Sealy Rodeo in 1982; he was buried with his boots on.

Through those years it seemed perfectly natural to me not to have even kissed you, not to have imagined myself married to you with two perfect children and a golden retriever. We were pals. Neither of us wanted anything more. If I had told you why I missed a week of school in April of our freshman year, I don’t think it would have benefited us or our friendship.

I could dress the story up all kinds of funky ways, and it would probably stroll right down the runway, turn, and stroll back to the dressing room and do it all again. The naked truth is so mundane, though, because it happens to way too many girls. A neighboring farmer, old friend of my Dad’s, started sweet-talking me in our barn while he was over visiting. He told me how pretty I was becoming, and filled with the boundless self-esteem of young womanhood I said, "Uh-uh!" but thought, Really?

At that time, Papa Joe Pedraza was one of many Texas farmers caught in the cattle crisis, a little-noticed bottoming-out of a cattle market that somehow had grossly overinflated in the late ’70s. This neighbor had come to tell Dad that the co-op had already rescued a half-dozen farms that year, and it couldn’t honor Dad’s request for an extension on his loan. That same sumbitch was there in the barn now, barraging me with flattery until my guard was lowered, and before I knew it, he had me pinned to the straw-covered floor. Fortunately, we were a good distance from any quarter horse’s dumping ground.

Somehow this guy got me to believe that if I resisted or told anyone, he would convince the co-op to foreclose on Dad (reallife melodrama!), which would put four generations of the Pedraza family’s honest labor in deep manure. Besides, if I told, it would be awfully hard to prove, unless I had a baby that resembled him, and if I had a baby that ugly, I vowed, I’d kill it—and myself—as soon as I was able.

Not telling, withholding any hint of the trauma of having that revolting appendage of his inside my pubescent twat, brought on a kind of psychosomatic general malaise that lasted a week. I cried, I vomited, my sinuses ached, and my ears turned incandescent pink. I only got better when Mom started talking about visiting Doctor Einhardt, our GP, a former ob-gyn who had delivered my sister and me. There’d be no hiding the experience from Dr. E.

The neighbor, whom to this day I will not mention by name, did not die a cruel and ironic death as Paul Miller had, but he was busted weeks later for misusing co-op funds and lost his own farm after spending two years at the State Pen in Sugar Land. The constable also found the hundred or so potted cannabis plants basking under grow-lights in his attic. I never saw the ugly prick—or his ugly prick—again.

Do you like the Clash?

It was 1982, and the Clash were on their last U.S. tour, but kids in Sealy had just discovered the band through their first big U.S. hit, Rock the Casbah, with a video filmed in Austin, about the time MTV became available in rural Texas. Petra Balcón, my closest female friend at the time, was staring at my chemistry notebook, which was completely covered in Clash paraphernalia.

You had found an 8-track tape of Give ’Em Enough Rope at some music store in Columbus which has long since vanished, a victim of Wal-Martization. The music was angry, discordant; the lyrics, incomprehensible to American ears. We were hooked. That was two years earlier, when we were still middle schoolers.

How long have you known me, Petra? I said, watching her primp in her locker mirror.

Since…fifth grade—you know that.

"And didn’t I tell you last year that you should come over and listen to Sandinista! with me all the way through? And didn’t you make up something ‘better’ to do every time?"

Yeah, but you told me it was a three-record set. I don’t know anybody who can listen to three records back to back by somebody they’ve never heard of.

Well, you’ve heard of them now.

Who?

"The Clash!"

That was the Clash?

That was the Clash.

Cool! Can I borrow it?

A three-record set? It cost me 25 bucks.

I’ll bring it back as soon as I’m done, she promised. Well, her dad burst into her room two minutes into The Magnificent Seven, smashed all three discs, tore the cover to shreds, told her no daughter of his would ever listen to that Nigger shit. He never bothered to look at the Anglo faces in the jacket photos. It was the first time I’d ever heard of a Mexican—one of my people, for fuck’s sake!—using the N-word. At least he didn’t slap her around like the time he’d caught her with a home Afro perm kit a few months before.

To replace my lost treasure, you made a cassette of your copy of Sandinista! which my cassette player promptly ate. Some days you just can’t win.

I relate the Clash story not just as a parable of conformity, but also to illustrate to anyone who cares just how important all things Clashy were to you and me. Before we fucked for the first time—and I use the term fucked generously—we had driven around Houston’s Loop 610 clockwise and listened to London Calling, the pinnacle of Strummer-Jones collaboration. While we snuggled and smooched in the bed of a borrowed pick-up, in our pre-meditated make-out session, you got dewy-eyed and said cheesily as you please:

"Come weeth me to ze Casbah!"

I let you undress me, a process which took just long enough that your weasel went off half-cocked, spewing on the nearest textiles. At least your timing was better on our second attempt. It didn’t add up to nirvana on earth, but it was a satisfactorily subversive gesture, a wicked pleasure just in the doing.

Since I first heard about sexual intercourse, I’d been told that love preceded sex, but never the other way around. I’d been told wrong. After the act, I fell perilously in love with you and everything about you that I had previously just admired. Of course I assumed that you felt the same way.

Don’t you dare send me a valentine, you said in February of our junior year, as we passed a Hallmark store in Memorial City Mall.

What makes you think I’d do that? I played along.

This hearts-and-flowers stuff is way overrated. There’s better ways of proving you love somebody than giving Mr. Hallmark your hard-earned bucks.

What makes you think I love you? still thinking you were pulling my leg.

Did I say that you did? No, I’m saying, basically, just because we’ve—

—gone to the submarine races?

—doesn’t mean you have to pretend that I’m your ‘true love.’

For fear of frightening you away, I kept my feelings to myself. It didn’t traumatize me as keeping the rape a secret had, but I walked around nauseated for four days,