So here I am, living with leo in east texas, about sixty miles out of dallas on the edge of a very small town. At first it is all right. We don’t have to pay rent, we keep chickens, we have a garden, and we write a lot. But then the money runs out. The truck breaks down, the plumbing breaks down, the garden rake breaks, the dishes break, leo breaks me over his knee, I break every promise I ever made to him, and no money in the house for fixing anything. Two of my kids off to el paso to live with their dad. Later on they will tell me how they got used to having sausage every morning with their eggs. Only morgani stays. He’s already been in el paso with his dad. He’s a high school drop-out, his eyes weird, unable to focus right, so it’s not easy for him to get a job in a city running fourteen percent unemployment. In el paso he drilled holes in polished rocks for jewelry for a little while, but the holes were always off-center by a quarter of an inch. He dropped too many dishes on the sambo’s restaurant job. Burger king told him he didn’t have what it takes to be burger boy. Fluorescent lights at safeway were like strobes to him, made him disoriented and blind. He comes to be with me in the country just when the money is running out, and I am thinking it is time we all move to dallas and get some jobs.
Well, leo doesn’t want to go. He dreams of writing poetry about chickens and ducks the rest of his days, but then he knows as well as I do that some kind of money has got to be made. And no job in this little town we’re living in, the storefronts boarded up along the one downtown street only used to store sweet potatoes in. The only people living in town, besides us, are either independent living on farm income or retired living on social security or young commuters traveling as much as one hundred twenty miles round trip to work every day. And that’s not for me. Better to die from crime on the streets in dallas than to live my life on the freeways, I say. Finally leo acquiesces, he says he’ll move to dallas if I can find a place for less than two hundred a month, all bills paid. Then maybe we’ll save up some money fast so we can move back to the country again (but it’s a dream, isn’t it leo, I am thinking but not saying, this country self-sufficiency, the two of us like awkward aliens in the midst of these smug farmers, who watch us serenely as our house peels its paint and our clothes give out).
So I get a jump start for the truck from a mechanic down the road one saturday morning, leave leo with the tomatoes, leaning on his hoe like the farmer he isn’t, his head full of tetrameter instead of compost and sevin spray, and drive into dallas with morgani to find us a place, money in my pocket pooled together by leo, morgani and me. I park the truck in east dallas in front of the apartment of a jazz drummer friend whom I know doesn’t have very much money either, so that I figure I’m in the right neighborhood. Morgani stays with him to smoke a morning joint, and I start walking up and down this street, the name of which is swiss avenue.
Now swiss avenue is a very special part of dallas. It begins abruptly in the broken neighborhoods vacant houses made rubble from the swaths cut out of them for access roads for northcentral expressway cut just east of downtown. Then it curves past wooden hotels with weekly rates liquor-store / upholstery-shop / broken glass across the sidewalks side by side with little clapboard houses still being lived in by little granny women watering grass in the afternoons, at night locking themselves inside wrought iron barred doors with shotguns propped against teevee sets and needlepoint in their laps. Then the street gets a little wider, more trees, the public immunization-for-the-kids-and-tetracycline-for-herpes clinic, the dallas theological seminary, the apartments where the doughy seminarians hold prayer hours at night with their young pregnant wives, kneeling together on the shag carpet of bedrooms with iron grilles on the windows and iron gates across the courtyard doors locked-up at ten o’clock every night, and the other apartments with rock-and-roll blaring off the balconies where the chicanoes vietnamese men living off of women waiting tables and hustling their asses bikers secretaries black jazz drummers all live. Then no more than a mile and a half from where it began, the street suddenly widens into two lanes with a well-tended ribbon of city park in the middle, planted with flowers and trees. And the houses stop being apartments and become mansions, freshly renovated by young rich lawyers and bankers, only one family per house. There, where the street crests into wealth, rests the mansion of brother crumwell, whose congregation tends to wear suits sunday mornings and sheets at night, a black holy smoke from kindled crosses heavy over downtown dallas as carbon dioxide at eight o’clock rush, where his church spreads itself out for blocks just like he must have envisioned it when he first founded it, the queen bee of the white baptist churches in the antebellum south. And I think that the prayers of brother crumwell, a man strong enough to stare his own dreams into stained glass and stone, directed at his downtown church and congregation from his mansion on swiss avenue two miles away, must be like a high-voltage tension line above the apartment buildings they pass over, jolting baptists and seminarians and winos, racist landlords and black tenants into an ever wilder stronger longer protonic-electronic dance, sizzling and sparking off of each other in ecstatic revelation.
But I don’t know much of this saturday morning. All I know is that there are good old two-stories with ornate facades, twisted roots of very large trees breaking up the sidewalks just right, lots of squirrels. A for-rent sign springs suddenly into sight in front of a red-brick apartment house, $175 a month, shown by appointment only it says, and just as suddenly I want to rent this place, I want an appointment now, I am positive that this is a cosmic sign, that the apartment will be just right. So I walk into the manager’s apartment, there is a picture of christ sweating blood while he prays at gethsemane above the manager’s desk, where a frizzy-headed woman is seated, long nose, long mouth that wobbles around.
Oh we say appointment only, she says, because we don’t want to rent to niggers (she rolls her eyes) although they caught us just last week (she half-whispers like there are aclu lawyers in the hall listening to every word), they fined us through the apartment association, now we’ve even got one on the first floor. And oh-ho-ho, I think to myself, here is one of those, but I don’t say anything, I don’t defend my black brothers and sisters, I don’t remind her that all of us born into southern families like I was and like she no doubt was probably have a little black blood, I don’t command that herd of pigs living in her to come out. Instead I shuffle around, I look anywhere but at her in a terrible kind of pretense that I didn’t really hear those words coming out of her mouth, all because I want to live in her pretty little priced-right apartment house. And then when she starts asking me questions, all this bullshit of my own starts spewing out. I don’t tell her I am unemployed, I say I am a free-lance writer working out of my own home, moving to dallas to pick up some jobs with the newspapers, the magazines, I show her a folded up copy flat and worn I’ve been keeping in my wallet like an i-d card of the only story I ever published with the dallas morning news, ten pointers on buying squash. Oh you’re a writer, she says, oh yes, I say, and my husband (DOCTOR taylor I say) used to work at the universities but he is tending right now to our country home and is a writer, also, and a poet like myself, anxious like I am to get a small dallas apartment so that we can talk more intimately to all of these editors who have been wanting to see our work. Well, she says, writers would find this apartment house to be good for writing, quiet and nice, shorty my husband who is really the landlord, not me, I just keep the key to the moneybox, she says, ha-ha, shorty makes sure this apartment stays good and quiet, there may be these niggers and dirty greaseballs living in the apartments down the block playing their loud music, but shorty is a good landlord, he doesn’t let anyone rent who doesn’t promise to be quiet, he makes everyone turn it down at ten o’clock. She herself, she says, reads poetry, there is poetry in guideposts magazine, and she wonders if I have ever written anything for that. But I say no, that I haven’t seen that particular publication myself. Then she asks if I go to church and I tell her that I used to go quite a lot, saying nothing about crazy holy rolling in the aisles pentecostal days before taking up marijuana pipes and sexual sweats again (the old hippie side of me too comfortably myself to ever die without returning). Her face lights up oh that’s good, she says, have you found a church here yet? You should go with me and shorty to ours sometime, it’s the biggest one in the country, it’s brother crumwell’s hard-sell baptist church where shorty is one of the elders. Yes, he used to be in prison but now he’s an elder in the hard-sell baptist church and the landlord of twenty-eight apartment houses.
And of course of course, I am thinking, brother crumwell is the name of this spirit that is making this woman flop her head around on her neck squint her eyes and twist her mouth talking nigger greaseball dirty animal smell of hippie bible tells us to do you go to church dear? Even living out of dallas sixty miles I had heard some about brother crumwell. But I just keep on shuffling and smiling, not saying yes I’ll go or no never never, like hopeful tenants do to landlords everywhere, willing to disown children, lie about pets and what kind of people they sleep with just to get a place to live at a decent price on a street with squirrels.
So just then a man stops in the doorway, looking at me like men look at old cars on sales lots trying to size up where they’ve been and who’s been driving them. He has blue eyes and a broken front tooth, and because he’s only about five foot two, I figure this must be shorty.
Oh this is a writer, the woman says to him, I told her she didn’t have to have an appointment, her husband and her need a city apartment to write in, they’re tired of driving in all the time from their country home.
Gasoline prices, I tell him, everyone knows how that is.
He pulls out a key from his pocket and motions me down the hall. I only half-listen while he’s telling me that he will be putting a new lock on the back door soon, that he keeps an eye on everyone coming and going, he doesn’t let strangers wander in the halls, he runs a tight apartment house, he owns twenty-eight houses in the neighborhood, while he is opening one of the doors, while we are walking into this apartment, and it is mine. It is mine! It is an efficiency, but it is an efficiency of grand style. It has a murphy bed in the front room that folds down from the wall with a closet large enough for a little office if the clothes are pushed to the end of the rack. There is a kitchen and a space there for another desk behind the refrigerator, closet for me and kitchen for leo, even though I am a little claustrophobic, better that leo can look out the window and see trees than me, I don’t mind. Then we can put a cot in the living room for morgani and the three of us will be a little cozy, it’s not exactly a town house, but it will launch us in dallas without taking all of our money, and I am in love with high ceilings and windows on two sides.
Now don’t pay any attention to this fellow, shorty waves to the door on the other side of the hall, he’s a minister but he’s a little off, he goes to our church but they don’t let him preach anymore. We walk down the hall, to the office, he knows I like his apartment, it doesn’t matter if there’s a baptist minister across the hall or not, I tell him I talk to baptist ministers all the time.
Back at the office shorty ducks out for a minute when someone comes in the front door, he starts talking out in the hallway about people who have friends who park in the wrong spaces in the parking lot. The wife has a long paper for me to sign. It’s a six month’s lease that says only two people living in an efficiency at a time, no pets, no children, a hundred dollar deposit, all your belongings no longer yours if you don’t pay the rent. Well, I don’t know, I finally tell the long-mouthed wife, if this will work or not because there are my husband and myself, but there will also be morgani, my eighteen-year-old son, living with us, at least until he gets a job. Oh well, she says, that will be all right. She hands me a ballpoint and I fill in morgani’s name on the lease agreement, it’s not people like you we worry about, but you know the kind. Shorty comes in and looks at the lease agreement, now this morgani he says — the wife interrupts him, oh that’s her son, she says, he’ll just be around til he gets a job. I give her one hundred and seventy-five dollars in small bills, then count out five more twenties for the deposit money which she folds up in a wad and sticks in the cashbox underneath the desk. We just have these rules, shorty says, about no more than two people to an efficiency, and too, he says, of course no pot in the rooms, we don’t go for that.
We had a nigger girl come in just yesterday, the wife says, I could smell pot on her when she came in the door, and she had the nerve to lie about it when I told her we didn’t go for any of that.
For the first time I wonder if I have gone too far, overlooking too many potential danger signs in this landlord/tenant relationship, and maybe I should ask for my money back, take the lease form from the wife’s hands where it is lying and tear it into pieces, but then I decide that I am as worthy of two walls of windows and a murphy bed on swiss avenue as anyone else, and besides shorty begins telling me about his various experiences as an elder in the baptist church, he used to be a hell-raiser, he says, a drinker and such, but now he owns twenty-eight apartment buildings and goes to church. And I am thinking besides, I could always smuggle out my clothes and tv set one night if we had to get out.
Oh our minister has such a good sense of humor, the wife says, you’d really love him, I nod and say I bet I would.
That afternoon I bring morgani up to show him around, in the lobby we stop in front of the mailboxes where a long list of typewritten rules are posted in triplicate, one set to each wall, one inside the door, saying things like no washing cars in the parking lot, no loitering on the front lawn, no giving keys to friends, no leaving the back door open at night, no lights on in the laundry room, all violators being subject to getting thrown out. I point to number twelve which has been typed in caps. That means that we only smoke grass in the walk-in closet with the door closed, I whisper in morgani’s ear, and you hide your bong when shorty comes around. I walk him up the stairway, down the hall, get the key in the door just when the door on the opposite side opens and a pasty-faced man comes out. I certainly hope we’ll get along with each other, he says, without any semblance of a smile. I can tell immediately that this must be the baptist brother shorty was talking about, well I certainly hope we’ll get along with each other, too, I say, and we contemplate each other, eye to eye.
Well, I hope we won’t be having any sort of problems, he says a little bit more pointedly.
I hope we don’t have any sort of problems either, I tell him back, and then I know he is suddenly furious, it is inconceivable to him that I could imply that a baptist minister could give the same level of problems that a frizzy-haired woman accompanied by an eighteen-year-old with long hair could give, so I slack off, I smile, well aren’t these just wonderful apartments, I gush out, I am really looking forward to moving in, such great windows, such nice trees.
There are terrible cockroaches, he says.
Oh we’re used to cockroaches, morgani tells him.
And the noise is very bad, there is always noise, people going in and out, they never lock the back door either, and if you don’t lock the back door, then shorty will throw you out.
Well I doubt we’ll have any trouble with that, I say, opening the door, happy to know you, I say when morgani and I are inside it. Morgani squints at me, growls his lip up and shows his teeth, I roll my eyes. Morgani says I don’t know about living here, and I say I don’t know either while I am pulling down the murphy bed to show him. He says do you think I can play my guitar? And I say not through the amplifier. He goes over to the closet, maybe thinking that he can get some earphones and practice his guitar in there if he pushes all the clothes back, because I haven’t told him yet that it will also have a writing desk, and while he is looking around I bounce up and down once solidly on the murphy mattress. The sun is coming through the oak trees outside the windows and I am thinking that leo will enjoy this after all, being a poet, appreciating green and gold light. So I bounce up and down two or three more times, suddenly happy as any border smuggler when contraband has crossed the line.
This story originally appeared in Womansight, a monthly journal published in Dallas (P.O. Box 64974, Dallas, Texas 75206).
