A Sailor Lost in Texas

1995

    I married into Dallas.  And, as if that weren’t enough, Boston too.  Which is quite a parley.

    Actually my wife’s parents live in a place descriptively called Plano, Texas, which is a technoburg invented by Ross Perrot.  “Technoburg” is not yet in my dictionary, though I note that “technobabble” is, which is almost the same thing.  A technoburg is apparently a city of several hundred thousand residents, including a couple of golfers so famous even I recognize their names, all living in large brick homes in large brick developments, with names redolent of the Old West, such as Saddle Bronc Estates, surrounded by high brick walls in the proximity of a few corporate headquarters of high tech companies, such as J.C. Penny.  Anyway, that’s New Plano.

    There is also an Old Plano.  The buildings there predate 1980. 

    Plano is just up the trail from Dallas, the trail having become Interstate 75, and can be counted a part of Greater Dallas, if that is not an oxymoron. 

    I never had any desire to visit Dallas, and I still don’t.  That is not because I dislike the place, but because I cannot find it.  And I looked.

    Unquestionably there is a cluster of tall glass and steel buildings rising from the plain beside a puny excuse for a river, the Trinity, on the banks of which a lawyer named John Neely Bryan built a trading post when he moved from Tennessee in 1841.  And there are a lot of people and a lot of cars and a lot of tollways and freeways and parkways and expressways, with interchanges that double as amusement park thrill rides.  And lots and lots of shopping malls:  one Dallas claim to fame is that it has more shopping centers per capita than any city in the United States.  Another is to have invented the frozen margarita.

    But none of it makes any sense.   Cities grow around rivers--and I promise you, the Trinity does not qualify--or harbors or something.  That John Bryan’s trading post grew into the eighth largest city in the United States is no more likely than Kevin Costner clearing a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield.  Even the Dallas Official Visitors Guide can only point to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870ties.  Dallas may well be the purest achievement of civic boosterism extant.  “Build it and they will come.”  Well, somebody did in the middle of nowhere.  And people came.  And are still coming.  Among other statistics, Dallas claims to be the number two convention center in the country. 

    Dallas has only two “must see” tourist attractions, one of which, Southfork®, we successfully managed not to see.  “They taken you to Southfork® yet?”  was a standard query, followed by, “Well, it isn’t quite what it used to be.”

    Southfork®, as perhaps you know and I did not, is the Ewing® ranch made famous by a television program, at one time the most watched program in the world, an honor subsequently held by Bay Watch.

    “Dallas”®, the LEGEND LIVES FOREVER the advertising proudly, if stridently, proclaims. 

    I was making my second and third circumnavigations when “Dallas”® was in its prime, and the only episode I saw was in Singapore, dubbed in Chinese, which significantly increased my enjoyment of the program.

    Nevertheless we spent almost an entire week in Dallas without visiting Southfork®, where we could have seen the gun that shot J.R.®, Lucy’s wedding dress, and other Ewings® memorabilia, had a bite at Miss Ellie’s Deli, and purchased a Southfork® collectible.  “Dallas”, Southfork, Ewings, and, yes, even J.R. are registered trademarks.  Restores one’s confidence in free enterprise.

    The other Dallas ‘must’ is a must.  The Sixth Floor, the name of the exhibit operated by the Dallas County Historical Foundation in what was the Texas School Book Depository, is very well done.  For me it was both profoundly disturbing and enlightening.  I found myself reliving that weekend in November of 1963, where I was when I first heard of the assassination, the moment on Sunday morning when in numb disbelief I watched Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on television.  The enlightenment came from standing at the window from which the fatal shots were allegedly fired.  Stand there and all the rhetoric, all the reports and commissions and enquiries become irrelevant.  Stand there for even a moment and you see that it was such an easy shot.  Pitifully easy. 

    What in the end can you say about a city whose essential tourist attraction is such a place, except that the things I liked best about Dallas are in  Fort Worth.

    Some years ago I heard on the radio a woman journalist define the difference between Dallas and Fort Worth.  She said, “What in Dallas they call sushi, in Fort Worth we call bait.”

    I like the line, but it gives a false impression of Fort Worth as  plain spoken, down to earth, and perhaps unsophisticated.  Fort Worth, after being a fort, was a cow town.  The start of the trail.  The stockyards.  At least it had a real reason for existing.

    Well, the stockyards are worth a visit, but there is more to Fort Worth than the stockyards, even if you are not married to an architect.

    If you are married to an architect, as I am,  or are an architect, or know something about architecture, you already know the name of Louis Kahn.  I, who only reluctantly even live in buildings, did not know of Louis Kahn until recently, although I lived for some years near and often saw the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, one of his masterpieces.  Another is the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, which claims to be “one of the two best small art museums in the country.”  I rather think that this may be true, even though I can’t find anyone who will tell me what the other one is.  The only one I can think of is, if Puerto Rico counts, the museum there in Ponce.

    The Kimbell is well worth a visit, both architecturally and for its exhibits,  permanent and touring.  Being small is an advantage.  Big museums are often overwhelming.  When we were there, the Kimbell was host to ancient artifacts recently unearthed in China.  The place was crowded enough to make one wonder about one’s stereotype of Texans.  Such doubts, however, were laid to rest at our next stop.

    In the unlikely event a cowboy dies and goes to heaven, he will be disappointed if it differs much from Billy Bob’s.  This may not be true of real cowboys, who are pretty much extinct and remain only as symbols of The Old West, presumably a trademark registered by someone somewhere; but it is surely true of the urban variety.

    Billy Bob’s--actually Billy Bob’s Texas®--is “The World’s Largest Honky Tonk.  Gifts.  Games.  Bar-b-que.  Parties.  Live Pro Bull Riding.  Call for a Free Catalog.” 

    Wait a minute, a bar so big it has bull riding on live, not mechanical bulls? And a catalog?   Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  It is all true.  And more.

    At 6:00 p.m. we left the serenity of the Kimbell, where a string quartet was performing  among  two thousand year old life size Chinese statues, and drove a couple of miles to Rodeo Plaza at the Fort Worth Stockyards to a Texas size parking lot.  Because it was early, we didn’t have to provision for the walk to the club.

    Not being certain just what a “honky tonk” is, I looked it up.  My Webster’s (no relation) says a honky tonk is  “a usually tawdry nightclub or dance hall” and makes other unflattering comments about country music and cheap entertainment.  Well, partner, Billy Bob’s ain’t cheap and it ain’t tawdry, though people do dance and there is country music, often ear shatteringly live and on two stages at once.

    You realize right off that Billy Bob’s is not, say, Cheers.  Billy Bob’s has a ticket booth just like a movie theater, and it costs about the same as a first run film just to get in.     

    Once inside, you are in a big room.  “Big” really isn’t adequate.  We are talking about a room  so big that it has an information desk and a lot of other smaller rooms off it, one of which is itself big enough to house the live Brahma bull riding without being noticed.   The place is so big, you can’t see the far end, and you have to get instructions to find the bulls, much less a bathroom.

    Receding until they are lost in the distance, there are bars and bars and bars and bars.  Mostly they serve beer. Once you get inside, Billy Bob’s is not expensive.  Beer costs $2.50 or $3.00 a bottle.  A waitress said that Lone Star sells best.  On one bottle I saw that Lone Star is now owned by Fosters, which is Australian and really far west.

    Early in the evening, families and lost sailors echo hollowly around.  The bar-b-que is good.  The wooden dance floors are uncrowded enough to give the practitioners of the two-step and something called, I believe, the Cotton Eyed Joe, room to display their skills and practice new steps.  Compared to urban dancing seen elsewhere, line dancing is laid back.  Men hook their thumbs in their jeans and make subdued, subtle little gestures with their feet.  Couples dancing side by side are joined by singles, all sort of keeping their eyes on and following one spontaneously accepted leader. Democracy in action.

    By about 9:00 p.m., when we gave up some irreplaceable seats overlooking one of the dance floors to go watch the bull riding, the families go home and the single crowd arrives.  When we returned from the bulls, we found a shoulder to shoulder, loin to loin, crush of secretaries, school teachers, accountants and insurance salesmen, dressed in skin tight jeans, with color coordinated western shirts and boots.  The women sometimes wear color-coordinated cowboy hats.  For some reason, the men who wear hats generally wear black hats. 

    I know these people aren’t real cowboys because there aren’t that many real cowboys left in the world.  And there never were.  Besides, my wife, who is a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard, confessed that when she lived in Dallas she, too, owned a pair of cowboy boots.  A prime pair of cowboy boots costs as much as a small car.  I fit in because my wardrobe consists of four pair of khaki shorts and four pair of Levis and it was too cold to wear the shorts.  However, I am confident that I was the only person of the thousands at Billy Bob’s that night who was wearing Docksiders.

    The logistics of Billy Bob’s are astounding.  Waitresses carry beer to tables in six-packs.   Empty bottles are tossed with a crash into countless strategically positioned trashcans, which are repeatedly filled and emptied.  Beer is delivered truckload after truckload.  And broken bottles hauled off by a train.

     In addition to dancing and drinking and singing along to such lyrics as “God bless Texas” and “I want to live and die between the Red River and the Rio Grande” and watching live bull riding and trying to pick someone up and eating, you can have your photo taken on a fake bull, buy tee-shirts, have an interactive gun fight with a life size  movie--interactive in that it responds to your shots, but unfortunately the bad guys’ bullets can’t reach you, and buy various tee-shirts, etc., which at least they have the decency not to call “collectibles.”

    I have no idea how many people were in the place when we left at midnight--thousands is not an exaggeration--but there was still a line at the ticket booth, and out in the parking lot, cars were still arriving. 

    Now don’t get me wrong.  I liked Billy Bob’s.  The people there all seemed to be having a good time, and we did too. 

    My new cowboy boots pinched a bit as I drove back to Plano.  I wonder how they’ll be on a wet deck at sea.