Robert Draper on Austin

[Frances Morey]

tele,
That was a delightful article. Thanks for passing it on. I will have to look
up the fellow's book. His slice of life in Austin was clearly recognizable
and I like his writing style.
Frances


On Sat, 24 Nov 2001 05:30:49 +0000, telebob x wrote:

>  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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"The Skinny on Weight Loss: One Woman's 
True Journey to Fat and Back" by Frances Morey
Order online <www.xlibris.com/bookstore>
or by phone at 1-888-795-4274 Extension #276





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