The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 61. Sunset Heights

 

Henry C. Trost home, Sunset Heights

As Marci and I had some time to kill before meeting Bobby and Lee, we drove up into Sunset Heights, my old neighborhood, where I reminisced over my former wanderings around this small neighborhood that looks over the chalky calle carved hills of the Fanja Del Rio of Juarez Mexico speckled with turquoise, pink and yellow box houses. 

Sunset Heights, which is shaped like a 45 degree triangle, with legs Schuster Ave and Mesa Street about a mile and half long and I-10 below carving a hypotenuse below the rock edge, is a culturally and economically diversified neighborhood consisting of historic mansions, apartment buildings, and small houses.  It is, in my opinion, one of the most unique neighborhoods in America.   Somehow, despite its spectacular views, its rich history, and its large homes, it has escaped complete gentrification.  It is the model neighborhood cities so desperately try to create and so desperately fail at maintaining.  Lawyers, professors, students, and working class families all live tightly together not only peacefully, but culturally connected.  They even share the same couple of neighborhood markets.

I ended up living there by chance.  It was Thanksgiving break, some friends and I were camping in the Guadalupe Mountains, and I only had one day to find an apartment before heading back to Dallas.  I didn't know the city at all, and just started searching neighborhoods around UTEP.  As I'd been falsely led to believe El Paso was an incredibly dangerous place to live, I was most concerned about security.  I looked at a couple of places that didn't meet my standard in that regard, and then I found a great old apartment building that had recently been remodeled.  There was a studio apartment available.  Although only a second-floor apartment, it had an amazing view of downtown due to the steep slope it was built into.  I was a couple of blocks from downtown and a few more from the university.  I could walk everywhere I needed to go.  It was perfect.

I loved that place.  As you walked in at street level, it was split-level.  One staircase led down to the basement laundry room.  There was a Coke machine and a pay phone there.  I don't think I ever purchased a phone in that apartment because I remember sitting on a plastic chair by the pay phone for hours trying to register for classes, having to stop and feed it coins over and over again.  Going up, half way, there was a little landing where the mailboxes were.  I'd stop and pick up the mail before making the turn and heading up the rest of the way up to the second floor which consisted of a long hall with apartments on both sides.  Each apartment had a iron gate door that had to be opened with a key both from the inside and outside.  I never understood how they got away with that with the fire martial.  Misplace your key inside and you'd be trapped banging frantically on the cage door as your apartment burned around you.  As I misplace everything, this was a very real threat to me. I constantly checked to see if I knew where my keys were.  I was on the second floor, but because of the terraced hillside, it was at least three floors down to the parking lot next door.

Inside, the apartment was small but freshly renovated with new charcoal gray industrial carpet.  You walked into what was designed as the bedroom, but as I wanted a living room, I made the walk-in closet off to the side my bedroom instead.    There wasn't room for a bedstead, and so I just put a foam mattress on the floor.  For the living room, I bought a bunch of black, plastic crates and turned them on their side for my small, but growing book collection that included Le Corbusier's Creation Is a Patient Search, Dostoyevsky's Idiot, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, Jean Dubeffet: A Retrospective, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.  On top the crates, I placed my portable boom box.  And that was it--the only thing on that wall other than the window, which was glorious.  The skyline of downtown glistened day and night.  The only other things I had in that room was the TV, which was set on some particleboard crates that I'd painted black and a black cloth and natural wood director's chair to sit on.  On the walls hung several of my brother's charcoal city and landscape drawings placed in white matboard and framed with natural wood that matched wood of the director's chair, as well as some black and white photographs by my friend Marsh framed the same way.  That was it.  Simple.  Gray carpet.  Black book cases, a single black chair, natural wood.  The only color in the whole apartment was the framed vinyl disc of McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" which pictured McCartney in 1950's glam with a pink background.  My brother had shadow-box framed it with a mirror behind the floating record and lined the inside edges with matching pink fabric.  The whole thing was framed in a dark, polished wood.  It was quite stunning.  Unfortunately, I left it behind in one of my moves.  My brother had made it for my birthday without me knowing, and I still feel its absence today.

McCartney hung in the kitchen over a built-in white-wood breakfast nook, but was clearly visible from the living room.  I used the nook as my office and a hand-me-down Apple IIC computer sat permanently on the table.  The kitchen was small and dated with 1950s sink, faucet and appliances, but I liked it.  It matched the McCartney record well.

As much as I liked my apartment, I actually spent very little time in it.  I remember watching the first Gulf War unfold with horror on that TV.  It wasn't the war itself that bothered me so.  I actually thought we should help Kuwait.  No, it was the endless propaganda surrounding it--that somehow by getting involved we were saving democracy, which as an institution, would collapse all over the world if we did not go to war.  Never mind that Kuwait wasn't a democracy.  I protested once at the university, and then went back to quietly watching the propaganda machines spew lies covered by the nightly news but not really questioned by the media.

Other than that, I don't remember being in the apartment much.  I was in El Paso to learn to write, and in my mind, that meant being on the streets, taking in life, even if it was only as an observer.  Although I had a car at the time, I seldom used it.  I walked everywhere, and I mean everywhere, especially in Juarez.  If I wasn't in class or at work, I was walking.  Then I'd come home late at night and write.  I didn't have a plan.  I wasn't creating anything in particular.  I was just observing and putting into text the best I could at the time what I'd observed.

Border Storm, June 28, 1991

 

The whole night is thick

and unreadable.

 

Trees are dust clouds,

Dust Clouds trees.

 

I wonder what my amigos do

when dunes attack their plywood huts

And grains race through the cracks

Like water under pressure?

I also took pictures, lots and lots of pictures, and video.  For a while at least, it seemed I was quite satisfied simply to become the transparent eyeball Emerson describes in Nature.  I wasn't always content with that role though.  Today, in looking through writing from that time period, I came across the following: 

I want love

and I want it now.

Where in the hell is she?

and where in the hell am I?

I must be in here somewhere

buried below the photographs

and lengthy paragraphs.

It's a hell of a life 

being a great American chronicler.

 * * * * *

As Marci and I continued up through Sunset Heights, I had to stop and take a picture of one home in particular.  It always drew my attention on my walks to campus.  Although there are multiple large homes in the neighborhood, this one was clearly special--not by accident, as is sometimes the case, but by design.  I started out my undergraduate studies as an architecture major, and I knew from first glance the home was significant.  An extensive gently-sloped cantilevered roof floated over heavy, soaring brick columns and an oriental-detailed frieze.  It turned out that it had once been the personal home of Henry C. Trost, the same architect who designed the Bassett Tower where Marci and I were currently staying.  Completed in 1909, it is a masterpiece.  After a couple of years of walking by stunned by the subtle beauty, I would coincidently became friends with the son of the owner.  I always secretly wished to be invited for a look inside, but that chance never came until this trip.  Robert had inherited his father's home and I finally got to see inside.   It did not disappoint, but I'll get to that later.

Technically, other than for a couple of months when I stayed with my friend George, I lived all four years in El Paso in Sunset Heights.  However, as Mesa Street is on the other side of the hill, facing away from Mexico and the sunset, although views were still spectacular, it never quite felt like I was still in that historic neighborhood known for its large mansions, views into Mexico, and famous residents such as Pancho Villa.  Rather, it felt like I lived adjacent to the neighborhood and could still easily venture into its magic.

Whereas in that first apartment I felt I was there in the center of it all.  Across the street was an empty lot.  Concrete steps led up to a rock outcropping covered with broken glass.  There must have been a house there at one time.  Sometimes, in my mind, I'm still standing there.  It's sunset.  The sky behind the Juarez Mountains is tinged tangerine.  The dusty hills of Fanja Del Rio are muted to a soft, gray-blue and speckled with the first few luminated lights of evening.  A thin horizontal cloud of smoke spreads out from a dump above the houses.  The smokestack of ASARCO is silhouetted against a reddening sky, and the river blazes back a golden reflection.  Directly below me, I-10 hums with fervent activity, white lights in one direction, red in the other, as a train rattles just beyond it, between the freeway and the river.  I stand amazed.  

Sometimes, after all these years, in my mind I find myself still standing there, taking it all in, wondering what it all means to me--this line between two nations.  I wonder how to get it all down into words.  I never quite figure it out, but I also never quite give up either.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 60. A Dog Barks, an Old Man Sings "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

I still remember the day that launched me towards El Paso.  It was late afternoon.  I remember it being in the summer, but it could have been spring.  In Texas heat hits early.  I sat on a picnic bench near a pond at the apartment complex of one of my professors.  There was a weeping willow down by the water, and its leaves glistened in the late afternoon sunlight as its long stringy arms swayed in the warm breeze. 

His last name was Cohen.  I don't remember his first.  After I'd requested to see him, he asked me to drop by and talk about an assignment I'd written for his modern poetry class.  He'd given me a choice: redo it or fail the class.  I was hoping for a third option, and that is why I was there.

The class had been given an assignment to write a one page definition of modern poetry.  Instead, I'd written an eight-page fictional account that began like this:  

As an experiment in aesthetic, I hammered myself down to my hometown.  My goal was to understand effect, what makes grade grade--you know--the texture of a line lick-able.

In the exposition of the narrative, I (the protagonist) went to the library and dug up some quotes about modernism, including, "The world in which modern poetry grew up in was neither Christian nor moral; and poetry in our age has felt little able to rely on any structure of belief outside itself" (Hough).

Not willing to equate modern poetry as simply a mirror of the banality of life, I set off on an adventure to prove that modernism is "a way of seeing, a way of making words lick-able, touch-able".  I wondered, "What makes a word so hard you can kill with it?  What makes a word nibble so softly, it tickles you like cold cream on hot skin?"  And then I set off for my hometown where, in the dead of winter, I nailed myself to the gravel road that leads to the cemetery.  

From the eight-foot-tall plate-glass windows of my parents home, I watched the snow cake on the hills above.  I turned inside, anticipating my mother's reaction when I told here I was going to nail myself to Cemetery Road.  

 "What?  Why?  You'll get a cold.  No, you'll die of cold!"

Determined, I went ahead with my plan, riding an ATV over to the cemetery in the dead of winter:

Then, just before the city limits, where the ice-packed road ends and the salted, black one begins, at first grainy like pepper, then slick like obsidian, I stopped cold.  I got off, walked to the back of the ATV, it's cherry red metal blue, reflecting the winter sky.  I attempted to unlatch the black rubber straps on the glove box without taking off my gloves.  It didn't work.  My skin was exposed as I drew out a steel hammer, metallic blue in in the winter light, along with two large tent stakes and two leather bands with silver rings attached.

Next, I walked to the center of the road, my big black boots sounding like slowed-down jackhammers on the metal ice.  I crouched down, so as not to slide and break my back, and laid myself down on the frozen road, hammer in one hand, straps and tent stakes in the other.  I slid the glove on the left hand, wrapped it in the leather strap, and turning on my side, hammered the stake through the attached silver ring.  I decided one secure arm was enough for effect, put the hammer down, and relaxed.

Looking up, the sky was so gray it was blue, and so cold,  it seemed to crack.  Bits of glassy ice fell to the earth and pelted me in the face, scarring it hot.  A quotation from Dickinson came to mind:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways, I know it.  Is there any other way? (Dickinson).

I'm glad to say that I'm not that intense, and that after five minutes of being strapped to an ice sheet, I quickly decided I could sit by a fire and enjoy poetry that didn't make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off".  But, I did learn that modern poetry, is for me, undefinable.  It just is.  Some words grab, some don't, and it's not the word itself, but the surroundings, the words that neighbor the word, and the relationship between them.  Beyond that, I can't define modernism.

Professor Cohen had written something like, "Very amusing and well-written; now do the assignment as assigned or fail the class."

I, so stubborn back then, sat, watching sunlight glaze a weeping willow as I waited to make my argument against redoing the assignment.

He came down the grassy hill wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark green t-shirt.  He had dark wavy hair, glasses, and a thick, well-trimmed mustache.  I normally notice things, not people, so I'm not sure why this memory is so vivid.  Perhaps some part of me knew my life was about to change. Perhaps without me knowing it, my mind was savoring this volta in my life.  It has remained the pivotal moment between yearning to be a writer and becoming one.

He sat down on the picnic table and we talked.

Basically, it came down to this.  He saw that it was his job was to teach me to write literary criticism well.  I, on the other hand, saw that it was my job to learn to be a writer, not a critic.  He said I was probably at the wrong school then.  

And then he did the most amazing thing.  He said, "Drop my class, and go chase your dream."  He even provided me a route forward, suggesting the writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso as my entry into that world.

And that was that.  From that moment forward, I was no longer a literature major.  I was a writer.  I was no longer living in Dallas (at least not mentally).  Instead, I was headed for El Paso, right across the river from the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte which had so awakened my senses on a trip to Juarez not long before.  Sitting there, it seemed so right.  

The other night I had a dream.   I don't remember all of it, but in it, Marci and I lived in an apartment complex.  Our dog barked each morning and woke me up.  It aggravated the hell out of me, but when I got up to let him outside, I'd hear the most amazing rendition of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".  I'd look outside, and there on a balcony across the road, in the blue light of early dawn, was this old man with his guitar serenading the sleeping city.  His voice was thin, crackly, almost broken.  But the emotion it carried was thick, black and full-bodied.  It was so serenely beautiful.  On mornings our dog didn't bark, I'd sleep in and miss it altogether.

The artist's job is to be awake, to be singing, no matter what the world is doing.  I knew that well when I roamed the streets and calles of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.  I'm not sure I always know it now.  But with this book, I'm at least sliding the glass door open and walking out onto the balcony.

References

Dickension, Emily. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.