Robert Draper on Austin

[telebob x]

I pass this along for all of us to read, laugh and weep. It was published 
last month in GQ.

I just wish I could see the 3 sentences that were written in the Magazine 
version that made Mike Levy remove Draper's name from the Texas Monthly 
masthead.

tele


>From: Chris Walters <zembla@texas.net>
>To: "telebob x" <telebob98@hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: Fwd: Maureen Dowd on Bush contradictions
>Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 22:01:11 -0600
>
>Hi Chris,
>  I could send you the draft of my Austin story, but it does not
>include the three sentence passage referring to Levy that got him in
>a foam. Why that passage appeared only in a late version of the story
>is something I can't discuss, unfortunately, as it involves my
>editors and their own feelings about Levy.
>  Anyway, below is what was published, minus the Levy part. Asheville
>is outstanding but for the absence of Mex food & our pals. Hope all's
>well with you...robert
>
>ROBERT DRAPER
>AUSTIN (Essay-3417 words)
>Submitted to GQ/M. Beiser 6/8/01
>
>
>I fell into the urine business in 1987 the way you landed any job in
>Austin back then. My prospective employer and I knew the same writers
>and musicians, and one of them had told Nightbyrd that I was
>something of a weird guy. When Nightbyrd, a former Abbie Hoffman
>sidekick and underground newspaper publisher, shared that tidbit
>during the job interview, over Dos Equis and chips at a downtown bar,
>I remember feeling somewhat stung, because even in 1987 pretty much
>everyone in Austin was weird, and so when someone actually called you
>weird, it in fact meant that you were not content to be weird. You
>were ambitious. Strictly speaking, I was. But I was also like
>everyone else in town, long graduated and destined, at least in the
>short run, for underemployment. And so after Nightbyrd picked up the
>check, I followed him across the street to Byrd Labs, to begin my
>six-month career of packing vials full of synthetic drug-free urine
>to sell off to desperate military men and bureaucrats preparing to
>submit to drug tests. Nightbyrd offered me six dollars an hour-which,
>if your girlfriend had a job, as mine did, and if you were paid in
>cash, as Nightbyrd offered to do, amounted to a plum Austin gig.
>Byrd Labs operated out of a warehouse loft on the popular cruising
>axis of East Sixth Street. In times of high urine demand, I performed
>my gnome-like labors into the evening while the windows rattled from
>the melee of human heat-seeking missiles soaring in from quiet little
>towns all over central Texas. Occasionally I'd wipe the grubby yellow
>powder off of my fingers and approach the windowsill of the darkened
>loft, where I'd linger for several minutes like Quasimodo in the
>belfry, dumbly surveying the mischief below. In those days, the
>spectacle didn't yet make me feel ancient-though I did feel weird,
>being ambitious by Austin standards. Even Nightbyrd, the urine king,
>faced ridicule for his strivings, despite his leftie portfolio, his
>dogged nocturnalism and the mentholated ease with which he lied about
>his age. New tartlets materialized in the laboratory foyer without
>warning, unfailingly dressed for midday sex, at which point my boss
>would clock out, though never without first reminding me, in a
>somewhat anxious voice,  "Deposit all the checks before the bank
>closes."
>Just before noon one morning, Nightbyrd sauntered in to work and
>promptly instructed me to sweep his floor. When I refused, his
>predatory eyes narrowed. "What's the matter?" he sneered. "Are you
>too proud?" It was a cruel question to put to his urine lackey. But
>yes: I had no intention of submitting to something so common,
>especially since my citizenship in this strange, somnolent
>backcountry of charming malingerers and inspired if faint-hearted
>balladeers was tenuous enough already. The term "loser" had not yet
>entered the popular lexicon; in Austin, if nowhere else, being a
>character was vocation enough. Preoccupied as I was with reconciling
>eccentricity with ambition, I deemed myself better off leaving the
>floor unswept. A couple of months after I quit Byrd Labs, I received
>a sizable book advance. After the book was published, Texas Monthly
>hired me as a staff writer. In the summer of 1997, fully ten years
>after Nightbyrd had taken me in, I began to work for the magazine you
>hold in your hands.
>No one asked me to relocate from Austin, and so I didn't. In the
>meantime, Nightbyrd went off to Havana to start an English-language
>newspaper. I don't know what kind of reception he got. But one fall
>evening in '97, a prominent local restaurateur clinked his wine glass
>against mine and unctuously declared, "Austin needs people like you."
>How sweet, I thought at the time. The illogic, the portent, went
>right past me. At last, Austin needs people like me. Well, it got
>'em. Hordes of them. And so this one's out the door.
>
>I want to tell you about a place that never was.
>The blissed-out cartographers would mark it in the very midsection of
>Texas, on a dais of limestone among undulating emerald hills,
>bisected by the Colorado River. The state endowed it with its capital
>and a sprawling public university, which together conferred upon the
>town a sensibility of frisky enlightenment. As such, it became a
>haven for musicians, writers, seasonal Marxists, free sex and
>dirt-cheap Tex-Mex. So idyllic was the city that its few violent
>criminals were each assigned monikers-The Hyde Park Rapist, The Tower
>Murderer, The Choker Rapist-and thus banished to mythology. So
>vigilant were its stewards that when some spiteful bugger saw fit to
>poison a 200-year old oak tree, they hauled him into the brig and
>flayed him in the local press as if he'd been caught boiling babies
>on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion. So learned were its
>inhabitants that they were commonly (and unprovably) said to buy more
>books per capita than did any other citizenry in America. This was
>Athens, Atlantis, Utopia. This was Austin, one big unswept patio of
>groovy daydreamers.
>It was groovy, that is, if you didn't care much for spring or autumn,
>got off to a good drought, and were impervious to cedar fever and
>ninety-five per cent humidity. In truth, if you were one of the
>city's dark-skinned inhabitants east of Interstate 35, you saw quite
>a bit of crime, though that kind of riffraff got little play in the
>Austin American-Statesman, whose editors never bought into the
>above-cited evidence of Austin's brainy readership. Yes, there were
>hills, off in the distance, where the rich kept their boats and their
>deer rifles. And we had our bards, none so hallowed as Billy Lee
>Brammer, an enormously gifted fuckup who published all of one book
>and then slowly drugged himself into an early grave. Even as the city
>boosters yodeled on about "The Live Music Capital Of The World!", it
>was axiomatic among habitues of the music scene that if you ever
>nurtured dreams of reaching a national audience, your best bet was to
>get the hell out of Austin. Otherwise, you'd stay small-because in
>Austin, that was the whole point.  Dulcet and drowsily antic though
>it could be, and beyond the five months every two years that
>legislators gathered there to affirm their contempt for Big Gub'ment,
>Austin possessed a singular raison d'etre: to be unlike Dallas and
>Houston. It was the place that never was, nor ever would be, Dystopia.
>Until recently, Austin's chief claim to fame was its relative
>docility. Visitors to the twin demon cities would crumple with
>gratitude to discover that, from that searing infinity of empty
>boasts, big hair and proud ignorance comprising the Great
>Nation-State of Texas, there shimmered a mirage of dope-smoking
>cowboys and women with very little makeup. One could go months, even
>years, in Austin without witnessing an ass-stomping or hearing the
>word "nigger." Casual druggies didn't get hard time in Austin. The
>churchgoers didn't litter your lawn. (Hell, Madelyn Murray O'Hair
>lived here.) Janis Joplin was only the most famous name among the
>thousands of culturally dispossessed Texas youths who fled their
>native hellholes for the liberal oasis that was Austin. The result
>was positively, and negatively, Woodstockian. Like Joni Mitchell
>rhapsodizing about Max Yasgur's "garden," Brammer's dewy description
>of  "a pleasant city, clean and quiet, with wide rambling walks and
>elaborate public gardens and elegant old homes faintly ruined in the
>shadow of arching poplars" would prompt guffaws even from the local
>chamber of commerce. Better to regard Austin as a blank slate for the
>tribes who gathered there-and that was more than enough, until rent
>was due.
>The inability to find a decent-paying job anywhere in Austin itself
>became evidence of virtue. In a state where the only thing more
>oppressive than the month of August was its braying ostentation,
>Austin developed a knack for elevating unpretentiousness to an art
>form. The oft-tossed-off refrain, "Hey, it's Austin," meant that you
>could eat at the city's fanciest restaurant without running a comb
>through your hair or changing out of your well-pocked cutoffs. It
>meant that it was okay to crash parties and make off with as many
>links of barbecued sausage as you could jam into your denim jacket.
>It meant that you didn't have to own a necktie-and this became its
>own ideology. Austin the Un-City, Never-Neverland, beloved for what
>it was not. Let them eat nachos. Everyone was broke, and everything
>was beautiful.
>The imminent defilement of our scruffy Eden-which would mean that
>we'd all have to move back to the megapolis and learn how to shave
>regularly-insinuated itself into everyday chatter the way weather
>forecasts do in rural communities. Each of us could calculate to the
>day when Austin went to shit. It was when some ethos-bedrenched
>five-year old local institution (Nothing Strikes Back Ice Cream
>Parlor, Mad Dog & Beans Hamburgers, the punk club Raul's, the slacker
>coffee joint Quackenbush on Guadalupe) fell prey to the evil spirit
>of capitalism and expired amid bitter eulogies. It was when Don
>Johnson began flying into town to strafe the local titty bars. It was
>either the day a former hippie flower salesman named Max Nofziger got
>elected to city council, or the day Nofziger left public service to
>work for a car dealership. More likely, it was when your
>carpetbagging ass moved there, one month after mine did.
>Fortunately, our nymph knew how to pick herself up from the barroom
>floor. The first bewailings of innocence lost came in 1966, when
>Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower and introduced
>America to the peculiar phenomenon of mass murder. Then Willie Nelson
>drove in from Abbott by way of Nashville, and all was made right.
>Epitaphs were penned when the Armadillo World Headquarters shut down
>in the early eighties and an IBM office took its place. But a few
>years later, local girl Ann Richards won the Texas governorship and
>ratified Austin liberalism as the law of the land. In 1991, four
>teenaged girls were raped and murdered in a local yogurt shop,
>horrifying proof that Austin had at last been led to the urban
>slaughterhouse. Instead, the years that followed saw the rescue of
>the storied watering hole Barton Springs from contamination and the
>emergence of nationally recognized music and film festivals. Now the
>tourists flew in from Helsinki and Berlin, but their ill-disguised
>wonderment renewed our own. Jaded little bastards though we were,  we
>remained, at bottom, Texans-Super-Americans, as John Bainbridge
>termed us in his obscure 1961 classic: simultaneously self-enthralled
>and self-conscious, weavers of our own mythology, which we swallowed
>as absolute gospel, as long as outsiders did the same. Austin needed
>only believers. And so there we sat together, on the shadeless patio,
>licking our sundry wounds, peeling the labels off of the beer bottles
>with our thumbnails, pronouncing doom to and from the urinal, and
>then splitting the tab-which was never high, unless some asshole
>ordered the imported swill.
>That asshole was me. Even in the best of times, my relationship to
>Austin approximated a lover's quarrel: she was ever the languid
>vintage-attired pixie, hoarse from laughter and reefer smoke, and I
>the uptight aspirant. In the early eighties, I managed a profoundly
>untalented New Wave band, the Shades, and the bombast with which I
>promoted them did not play well amongst the hipster elite. My early
>scramblings as a freelance journalist won me further scorn. After
>immediately winning my first feature assignment from Esquire, I
>bought a new blazer and made the mistake of wearing it to the office
>of the Austin Chronicle, the arts-and-entertainment weekly and nexus
>of reverse snobbery, where any regalia tonier than a New Order
>T-shirt meant that you were either a Bible salesman or a narc. "So,"
>said Sylvia, the sultry young woman at the front desk as her olive
>eyes took in my ensemble, "is this what an Esquire writer's supposed
>to look like?" The editors killed the piece, and I completed the
>humiliation myself by becoming a scribe for the prestigious trade
>journal Meetings and Conventions, which paid decently but late, as
>the New York accountant insisted upon sending the checks to Ostin,
>Texas-no doubt my kind of place, if I could only find it on the map.
>
>A very unexpected thing happened to my town a few years back. It
>became a place where one could earn a fortune. By 1997 you began to
>see them all over town: the fabled Dellionaires, loping from golf
>course to wine shop to sailboat in the middle of everyone else's
>workday, garbed in pastel like plump Easter eggs. Many of them were
>humble geeks who'd caught the high-tech wave just right. We'd known
>them back when; and though it was conceivable that their leader, the
>young schemer Michael Dell, was the antichrist, he made a fine laptop
>and kept his sprawl far away from Barton Springs, so who could
>complain? The long-repudiated notion of getting rich in Austin was a
>state that now seemed divinely compatible with the Church of the Holy
>Slacker. Yesterday's philosophy grad student became today's
>webmaster. All writers great and small began to craft screenplays.
>The preeminent local ad agency, GSD&M, flush with success from its
>Clinton connections, relocated to a cavernous office adorned with the
>strikingly unironic sublogo IDEA CITY. That idea was, of course:
>Let's Act Like Republicans!
>So accustomed were Austinites to forecasting the apocalypse that the
>depths of the transformation eluded them at first. The handsomely
>weathered face of Ann Richards was no longer in evidence: she'd moved
>off to Washington to become, among other things, a tobacco lobbyist.
>Now the grande dame of Austin was Barbie lookalike Susan Dell. The
>city's freeway traffic jams were at first blamed on NAFTA, then on
>bad drivers transplanted from Silicon Valley. The guru of the inane
>bumper sticker slogan, What's The Hurry? You're Already In Austin,
>began marketing a somewhat more plaintive battle cry: Keep Austin
>Weird. But why the fretting? Dogs with bandanas still snagged
>frisbees in Zilker Park. The great blues club Antone's still hosted
>timeless riffs even as its overlord, Clifford Antone, was cooling his
>heels in the Bastrop federal prison on a dope smuggling charge. Las
>Manitas still served up quintessential huevos a la mexicana, if you
>could find a parking place. And when, on the very late evening of
>November 7, 2000, the main boulevard of Texas's most liberal city
>teemed with revelers cheering the apparent election of a conservative
>Republican to the presidency, you could still say, employing the same
>casual condescension with which we dismissed the touristic banalities
>of East Sixth Street: "Let 'em have their place."
>So let me tell you how the place that never was Dystopia is today.
>The city of Austin, once a manageable burg of 300,000 when I arrived
>in 1976, now contains 1,125,000 inhabitants in its metropolitan area.
>Its newest arrivals are primarily from the West Coast, seekers of a
>more perfect geekdom. Austin, so pledged the corporate hand-out, was
>a Quality Of Life city. Affordable housing in Round Rock, just
>minutes from work! No state income tax! No racial tension that we
>know of! An "entertainment district" for you nightcrawlers! Live
>Music Capital Of The World! And so on. Today Austin's old guard
>mutter amongst themselves in the margins of coffee shops and Tex-Mex
>dives. The rest of the city has been subsumed into the generic
>collossus of Greater Silicon Valley, a wasteland so smug and
>culturally vapid that Dallas circa 1963 seems flamboyant by
>comparison.
>Here is what the New Economy and its cocky little offspring have done
>for Austin. According to a recent study, it ranks among the top seven
>American cities in traffic delays-right there with Dallas and
>Houston. The region's chief employer, Dell, has laid off
>approximately five thousand workers in the first five months of 2001.
>Owing to its past denunciation of high commerce and its more recent
>high-tech sputterings, downtown Austin is a butt-ugly morass of
>Stalinist bureaus and half-finished concrete shells. There may well
>be an unsightlier cityscape among the nation's prosperous burgs, but
>I have yet to be pleasured by it. Dozens of new restaurants have
>chased the yuppie dollar into Austin in the past three years-and
>nearly all of them, if there is any culinary justice, will be chased
>out before the next boomlet. It is still possible to two-step at the
>Broken Spoke and strike a sullen pose at the Continental Club;
>possible as well to be turned away at velvet-rope discos and saunter
>into shadowy swingers' clubs; possible, above all, to live within the
>bland sinews of the sprawl and never once visit the center of town.
>Of course, weirdness endures, here and there, like it always did in
>Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, San Jose, Kansas City and
>Phoenix. Austin is better than these cities in many ways, worse in
>many others. But those who maintain that there's nothing in the world
>like Austin either don't live there today, or do and don't get out
>much.
>As recently as a year ago, the disclosure that I was considering a
>move after 25 years was met with looks of astonishment and pity.
>Leaving Austin now? When it had everything figured out, at long last?
>When everyone had begun to dress smartly but still screwed with
>hippie abandon? When you could repair to the parking lot of the Back
>Yard while Lyle Lovett crooned inside, and smoke a joint crouched
>between two SUV's, yours and your boss's? When the student flophouse
>you bought a few years ago was now worth a half-mil and counting?
>When you could claim Sandra Bullock as your neighbor, could throw
>back shots of Don Julio with Jenna Bush and, if you knew one of Laura
>Bush's longtime pals, stood a decent chance of a White House
>sleepover, which would in no way disqualify you from denouncing her
>husband a few days later over wine and reefers? Had you lost your
>mind-or, worse still, your Dell stock options? A friend of mine, a
>realtor who'd swam many an ocean of margaritas and now found herself
>gyrating atop the high-tech boom, proclaimed without irony, "If
>Austin's so bad, why is everybody moving here?" Meanwhile, the twin
>demon cities to the north and south sat back and watched with knowing
>smiles.
>Any lamentation from this corner would ring false. I spent over half
>of my tenure in Austin scheming to move to a place where personal
>initiative was not held in similar esteem as venereal warts. Often
>what made me reconsider was my strange but abiding love for Texas;
>and if I was going to stay in Texas, where else but Austin? At other
>junctures, love, work or inertia held me back. Meanwhile, grudges
>mellow with the years. There came a point when I looked around and
>realized that I'd become a town fixture, a surprisingly sweet
>accomplishment. Austin was, at bottom, a civilized place. When it did
>not let fear of achievement darken its heart, it could be the most
>inviting refuge imaginable. Alas, Austin invited me in, when it had
>every reason to fear hustlers like me. I knew it then, when I berated
>the town for its proud puniness; and above all, I know it now, when
>the town's chortling motto, "Onward Through The Fog," has long been
>discarded in favor of that most compelling of exhortations, "Smart
>Growth."
>This past Memorial Day, my wife and I left Austin for good, and
>absolutely no one asked how we could do such a thing. The downturn
>will cease in time, but Peter Pan's leotards lie puddled in the dust.
>Among longtime dwellers of Billy Lee Brammer's gay place, the
>ever-fashionable wry pessimism has been replaced by a somberness
>borne out of genuine loss. Well, we've all aged. Still, I must
>confess this singular regret: I wish to hell I had swept Nightbyrd's
>floor when he'd asked me to. I wish I'd shown a little character
>instead of trying to be one. You know what I mean? There was real
>work to be done in the city, and when the place that was really
>Austin called my name, I was somewhere out on the patio, statuesque
>as a cactus, saying something really goddamned clever that I can't
>remember anymore.
>--
>
>			 \!!!!/
>			 (o o)
>       	-------------------------oOOo-(_)-oOOo-----------------------------
>
>
>	Last time I saw Marie, she's waving me goodbye
>	Hurry-home drops on her cheek that trickle from her eye
>
>				-Chuck Berry


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