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| 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.
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