After two nights in my brother’s house, we disappointed the scores of microorganisms that had begun colonizing our bodies by leaving New Orleans in search of hot showers. We found them at a Days Inn in Lafayette, where we saved about 40 percent on a room with a coupon book Ben had grabbed at the Mississippi Welcome Center almost as an afterthought. God bless Roomsavers.
On our second night in New Orleans, we had declined to go out for a Cajun dinner in favor of a free meal at the local Hare Krishna temple, where pious Hindis give away mountains of delicious Indian food each Sunday as a way of drawing outsiders into communion with the godhead. It was delicious, but we decided it would be impossible for us to justify spending three nights in New Acadia without abusing our colons with some authentic Cajun cuisine, so we found a place near our motel that specialized in such procedures.
It wasn’t the most romantic place to experience in the local fare—located about 50 yards from the interstate, with a gift shop in the foyer—but it had received high marks from a restaurant guide we had on hand, and there was alligator on the menu. That was Ben’s selection, along with chicken and sausage gumbo, which he and Rachel shared. Being a vegetarian, I was unable to immerse myself in Cajun culture as aggressively, although my fried stuffed eggplant was spicy enough to clear a drain clog. Unlike so many restaurants that traffic in large, sloppy portions, this one was clear-headed enough to forego napkins in favor of communal rolls of paper towels at each table. It was not the last time I would see this policy, and each time I did two thoughts would enter my mind simultaneously: First, how shamefully grotesque our eating habits had become that we needed napkins the size of placemats to clean our faces between bites; and second, how fantastic an idea it was.
Dessert was brick of bread pudding, which sat in a pool of peppermint mortar, and was so dense that with enough of them one could probably build an effective fallout shelter. My subsequent coma gave me time to watch a turtle-lipped beanstalk of an old man take turns solemnly two-stepping with a pair of old women whenever the accordion band at the front of the room would play something up-tempo.
We requested a late checkout and slept in, taking off for Houston sometime after noon. We had been looking forward to Texas for some time, envisaging wide-open prairies, tumbleweeds, and—if we were lucky—a posse of cowpokes chasing down some rustlers on horseback. To our dismay, the first bit of Texas looked more or less identical to the last bit of Louisiana—still mostly forested and unexciting to look at. Houston, which at 600 square miles is America’s broadest city, was marked in our atlas by what looked like a dried coffee stain splattered near the eastern edge of the state; the pine forests changed over to concrete jungles long before the skyline came into sight. Houston is so large, in fact, that it needs not one but two beltways to accommodate its morbid girth—I-610 running the inside track and the Sam Houston Tollway tracing a wider halo. Between them lay a commercial corridor so jammed up and hideous it was hypnotic.
We stayed with my friend Clay outside the second beltway in a city called Spring, where the outlet malls were only slightly less relentless, broken up as they were by gated residential developments. These carried bucolic names like “Candlelight Gardens” and “The Falls at Champion Forest”—epitaphs for the for the natural phenomena they may have replaced. Clay’s parents lived in one such subdivision, in a stucco mansion that looked more or less like all its neighbors—all Spanish architecture inasmuch as they were built by people who spoke only Spanish. Inside, the house was cavernous and ornate, with rooms that seemed posed for a catalog. The main bathroom was all bronze, with a mirror that I half-expected to offer me three wishes, and an external sink that seemed like a fine place to baptize a child. The dark-wood cabinets in the dining room held playing-card-themed china, and a robotic voice announced the name on the Caller I.D. each time the phone rang. Every once in a while, more robots would spray a mist of insect repellant from the rafters of the patio, just in case the bugs were bothering anyone who might be unwinding in the hot tub below.
Contrary to the Texan stereotype that nobody loves to perpetuate more than Texans, Clay is a sharp, soft-spoken and generally deferential person. We had met in Washington, D.C. the summer after my sophomore year in college. We had been in the same internship program, I spending my days being shouted at by an irascible television host and Clay spending his dutifully carrying out assignments of varying legal merit for the Nicaraguan consulate. Clay, who had already graduated college, stayed in Washington for two years, teaching Russian at an area high school. In the meantime, his father had sold his company and his parents had moved into this new house, and Clay, back from D.C. while figuring out what to do next, was almost as much a visitor in the house as we were, which may have been why he seemed so out of place there.
Clay took us to dinner that night at a restaurant in a strip mall called Tex-Mex No. 2, where we went after Tex-Mex No. 1 was closed. In between, we passed Tex-Mexes nos. 3 through 30, although they weren’t called that. “Back when my dad moved here after college, there was nothing here,” Clay said as we drove down one of Spring’s sun-bleached, four-lane thoroughfares, the fast food joints, pawn brokers, loan sharks, pharmacies, shower door merchants, granite and marble outlets, furniture retailers, and supermarkets whizzing past like wallpaper. “But there’s just so much room out here. There’s new stuff every time I come home. It’s kind of sad.”
Posted from S. Columbia Street, Marfa, Texas.
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