In 1970, I packed up my stuff at Notre Dame and flew to the house that my parents had bought two years earlier, in the Tanglewood section of Houston. This subdivision, not far from the brand-new Galleria Mall, resembled most postwar developments in that it thumbed its nose at Colonial (and European) traditions. The houses were all one-floor “ranches,” with low-sloping roofs and broad, rather than tall, windows. But they were not all alike. They were small at the south end, by San Felipe, and grew, block by block, larger toward the north, by Woodway. The house across the street from my parents’ house backed on to Woodway, from which it was hidden by a high brick wall.

I came to see the house as irretrievable ugly on the outside but very well laid out within; indeed, I had fantasies of transporting the floor plan, all 5500 square feet of it, to an apartment in New York.

I was impatient to get on with my life, and the way of life that I intended to lead, but not that impatient, not in my parents’ 5500-square-foot virtual apartment, with my own bedroom and huge bathroom at the other end of the house (it had been built as the dining room, and the bathroom as a pantry). After a year, my parents had to give me a poke. I have no idea how I found my first apartment; it was the sort of experience that I try to forget even before I find out whether it’s going to be good or bad. I have a general dislike of transactions, and also of changes. The before and the after might be great in their ways, but the shift from one to the other is essentially unsettling. I close my eyes.

I had already got a job. I worked at the radio station from soon after arriving in Houston after graduation until shortly before leaving for law school, seven years later. I was a staff announcer and then I was the music director. The pay was really quite awful, but that made sense (at the time), because I was doing something I loved. Well, I was not doing something I hated. I was not doing manual labor. Nor was I locked into the train of desolate ambitions that, to me, constituted corporate life. I was living in clouds of music, listening to it all day and learning to hear it better. But the glory days were still to come. For the first year at the radio station, during which I lived at my parents’ house, I was just a staff announcer, discovering that my poor opinion of Ravel was seriously premature. Then came the expulsion from the garden, and I moved to Montrose, a shabby-genteel neighborhood just west of downtown. I rented a garage apartment from a school.

Is this the time to talk about the school? It was an experimental school for pre-schoolers. A sort of day-care center. “Alternative.” “Free” (but with fees). It had just been started up, and I was helping out by renting the garage apartment. But this is not the time to talk about the school. I’ve just finished reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and it’s awfully easy to imagine Kushner telling the story of the school — which did not last very long. (Nobody died, but some Hell’s Angels showed up as friends of the house.) By the end (whatever that means — but it did all end), even I knew that the school was not cool. The mere thought of my grandson’s being stuck in such a hole prompts an involuntary scream.

In my garage apartment, I had an old kitchen table, some chairs to go with it, a desk that my parents bought before I was born, and a mattress on the floor. I kept my books and LPs in corrugated-cardboard boxes that didn’t take long to sag towards collapse. I don’t remember any kind of regular life; I suppose that merely renting the garage apartment was insufficiently transactional. There were still too many loose ends. A few memories persist. Punching holes in the wallboard when I couldn’t find my keys — I’m glad that I got that out of my system early on and cheap. (Living with the holes afterward was a mortification.) I bought my first piece of Spode Fitzhugh during those months — and at Tiffany, in the Galleria. And with the new charge account that the saleswoman had insisted on setting up for me, smelling the money somehow behind my denim overalls. (Maybe I was also wearing one of my father’s cast-off alligator shirts.) But the months of solitude were few.

I moved into the apartment on the eve of a hurricane — September, say. By the new year, or shortly thereafter, I was no longer alone in the apartment. I was no longer alone in bed, certainly, but there wasn’t there someone else living in what had been the tiny dining room? A refugee from the free school — and a dear friend during all my years in Houston? When did we all move out? Suddenly my bedmate and I were engaged, and living in one of those cheesy two-storey efficiency apartments, with outdoor access to each unit providing something of the funk of a motel. Soon married, we didn’t stay there long, either, although that’s where I took up the study of Chinese characters, if “study” is the word. Soon we were back out near the Galleria, in a period Fifties house that backed on to railroad tracks along which an occasional (but slow and endless) freight train would roll. By now, there was more furniture, and, presently, a baby. We stayed at the house for a year. Our landlord, who lived across the street and who had let us rent the house as a favor to my wife’s mother, declined to renew the lease. We moved back in the direction of Montrose, taking a neglected but stylish craftsman bungalow. This time, the landlord would hold us to the lease. Hold me, that is. Within two years of quietly minding my own business in the garage apartment, I had lost my wife and the daily company of my daughter, and I could not afford the rent on my own. Also, the Opal Kadette that my parents gave us as a wedding present was totaled while parked in front of a bar — maybe being at a bar, with a wife and child at home, was not a good idea. My mother-in-law bought her daughter a Vega as a replacement. I drove that car only briefly, perhaps for a week or two. Then it was back to the bicycle, and, soon, the Westheimer bus.

Looking back, I can see a handful of points where it might appear that choices were made, but they were never really made by me. I did choose to try to get a job at the radio station, and, years later, I did choose to study hard for the LSAT, spending my evenings going through sample tests (and learning that ETS was, to me, a foreign language). Going to law school was the only way I could think of putting an end to my improvident ways. Until deciding to try for it, however, I rarely did more than default. Whatever was easier, simpler in the short term, less disagreeable — that’s what I did. “Choice” didn’t come into it, not sensibly. While living in Houston, I was unable, or at least profoundly disinclined, to take life seriously.

Houston is one of the mysteries of my life, second, perhaps, only to my adoption. It can never be explained one way or another. It was deeply uncongenial, almost hostile to the likes of me, and I generally wish I’d never been there. But I’d never have gotten such a job at a classical radio station anywhere else (in New York, such positions were staffed by musicologists, with advanced degrees), and the job turned out to be a sort of prolonged seminar-for-one during which my mind expanded both faster and more strongly than it had done in school. Also, without Houston, no Megan and no Will.

***

This page has not taken me quite where I had in mind. I meant to explore my bohemian style, which involved innumerable furious renegotiations of the bourgeois platform. My parents might have found my way of life outlandish, but it was never, not really, bohemian, because it was always in the process of becoming both less careless and less carefree. Only this moment, however, does it occur to me why the process took the direction that it did.

It was because the idea of being the kind of man who lets women take care of everything was repulsive to me. I used to like to think that, by the time I got out of law school, I was a genuine gentleman. But it can’t be true, because everything that I learned about being a good man, I learned from women.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 1:29 pm.