The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 73: After Hours

The Blue Door Bar, our family hangout here at Dry Creek

It was late when we left Bobby and Lee's place.  Marci and I were tired.  I wanted to avoid I-10, so we took Piedras down under the interstate and over the railroad tracks to Texas Ave.  The city had that eerie late-night vacant look that I've always loved.  Recently, I painted a forgery of Night Hawks on my shed, and many years ago, when the boys were young, I turned the shed into the family bar with neon lights inside.  We'd go out on warm, summer nights, make milkshakes and watch movies in our own little hole-in-the wall establishment.  When we have company, I still turn on those lights, and when I'm out and about the property, I see a blue glow emitted from the large plate glass window through slatted metallic blinds.  Even here, at Dry Creek, the shed not much more than a stone's throw from the dark wooded creek-bottoms, coyotes yapping from ridges on the other side, the Milky Way spiraling overhead, town a couple city blocks west, I couldn't quite leave those empty urban streets behind.  I had to recreate such a scene in my own very rural yard.  

My love affair with late-night diners and bars on empty avenues half-lit on lonely nights began when I was in college.  I'd drive the old highway between Arlington and Dallas, Texas 180, which was dotted with scattered independent diners that had been built before the Dallas-Ft. Worth Turnpike was completed in 1957.  How those establishments hung on all those years, I'm not sure, and some didn't, but there were still more than a few open late into the evening.  They all served the same food, indistinguishable but descent, and within my budget.  Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes was the norm.  I'd sit in one particular diner on Division late at night on a regular basis, reading books and writing poems, imagining words would get me somewhere in life.  On Friday nights, I'd take Texas180 into Dallas and stop at a different diner each time.  Same food.  Same drip of the coffee maker.  Same smell of burnt coffee.  Same fluorescent lights.  Same window looking out on the night, bleeding reflections of the inside world with the outside city lights.  It was my peace, my stillness, and also my loneliness.  In such places I touched the abyss.  I found that somehow reassuring, like looking up and seeing a moon hardly-ever-walked-on, stone white and steady in the night.

In El Paso I'd walk down Mesa Street at 5:00 a.m. after working graveyards at All Night Rapid Fire Copies.  The street would be almost empty, parallel lines of street lights descending down the hill past the lit-up red brick cathedral to the skyline of downtown, Juarez blinking magnificently in the background.  There'd be the occasional passing car, and a couple of drag-queen prostitutes hanging out on the corner by my apartment building.  They'd say "Hi" in their shockingly deep, smoker voices as I passed them to enter an old brick building right out of a film-noir movie, complete with lobby of stained casino carpet and a brass-doored elevator (which didn't work).  I'd climb up five flights of stairs to an apartment that looked out on that same city, only from above.  The sky would be turning pink above the Franklin mountains, the waking birds beginning to rattle the morning with their chaotic song, when I'd climb into bed just as the freeway and Mesa street began their daily drone.

Urban nights have always enchanted me.  So much so, in my imagination, I have lived them across the centuries.  

Blue in a Baroque World

Through some worm hole
there is a cobblestone lane
lined with oil lamps
and pocked with rain.

Galaxies of light unfold
in ripples spreading out
in gathered darkness
puddled at the bottom
of a high hill.

The ragged man
with the blue glow
hears a violin in his soul
cut a coarse chord
that says I'm so damn tired

of this. It isn't his loneliness though
he knows as well
as high halls
and crystal chandeliers.

He'd like to pound a harpsichord
until it squeals like a pig. For
some reason he can't explain
he knows traces of God
puddle in the mire

at the bottom of the high hill
where a long tide pushes in

to fill the mud flats
obsidian pocked
by cold hard rain.

It was good to be driving down an empty Texas Ave late at night to our hotel.  It was good to enter a marble-floored entry and stand before a brass-doored elevator and rise to a room that looked out on that same lonely urban night from above.  I sat there for a few moments just looking out on the streets I once roamed late into the night, after hours.