Houston

by jerome pryzbylski

FIRST NIGHT IN TEXAS

"I never knew Dada but I know Motherwell."
From the men's room wall,
Lawndale Art & Performance Center
University of Houston

Hi. I'm a bartender from Detroit who was recently sent to Houston to write
about the art scene. What do I know about art? It doesn't matter.

Today's buzzword is "cross-training." Engineers do stints in sales, auto-
motive execs do penances on the assembly line, and New Age roosters keep
their biscuits in the oven and their buns in bed as homemakers. What could be
more "now" than sending a common mixologist to Houston to write about fine
art?

I travelled with an art authority. A tutor. A painter whose recent show at
the Detroit Institute of Arts recieved major intellectual surgery by the local
art critic. Who employed the touch of Joseph Mengele. This artist is also a
bricklayer and a union man. He's an Italian named Jake. Who hates the
Houston skyline because there aint no masonry in it.

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We travelled on behalf of the Michigan Gallery. It's an art co-op. A near
bancrupt organization in a similarly agonized city. The gallery is like a
boloney sandwich, double decker with crisp lettuce and Dijon mustard, brought
into a dungeon of urban blight. The Michigan Gallery had an ex- change show
with The Lawndale Art and Performance Center in Houston. As part of the
package they sent us a couple of artists. Jake and myself, in turn, went
south. We were financed with grant money. Read on. Follow your tax dollars
at work.

"Recognize a complex and emphatic sexual investment in looking and longing for
meaning."
Connie Hatch
"The Desublimation of Romance"
Lawndale Art & Performance Center
University of Houston

Jake flew to Houston a week before me. He's staying with Jackie Harris.
She's a painter and sculptor as well as a waitress at a topless bar. When
they pick me up at the airport she's wearing a t-shirt that smashes her
beauteous water-balloon breasts. Baggy jeans. Cowboy boots. She's a petite
5' 4" with bleached blond hair. Black roots. A Texas Rose with thorns.

We get into her '76 Plymouth. It's black as Charlie Manson's mustache. It
has mags on the back. It's a convertible. The top is down. A mouse and
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tarantula hang from the rear-view mirror. Plus a rosary and a disco ball
that sends screaming meamies of light dancing across the interior.

We drive past the Houston skyline. It's a magnificent relief in the flat
plane of Texas. The silver/blue/grey glass glistens like oil. Jake is un-
impressed. He points out the neo-gothic spires of a Phillip Johnson build-
ing. He says it's retrograde. Shameless kitsche. An act of intellectual
condensation. It doesn't matter that it contains brick.

Jackie takes us to her home in the Heights. We park the covertible next to
an old Cadillac hearse she's painted with skulls, shark-teeth and a huge
Virgin of Guadelupe on the hood. Jackie lives in a converted tile ware-
house. It's made of concrete block and looks like a Hell's Angel's club-
house. Across the door is scribbled, "Headquarters." Underneath its peak is
written, "JACKIE'S HOUSE OF WEAPONS... always open."

"How's the crime here?" I ask the woman living alone a neighborhood of
sagging tinderboxes.

"I have no problem," she said. "The neighbors are afraid of me."

I have to take a leak. Am instructed to go to the "Murder Bathroom". Red
paint is splattered on the floor and half-way up the walls. On the floor is
the head of a man whom Jackie affectionately calls, "My Husband." His blond
hair is nappy and knarled as sagebrush. His blue eyes stare, vacant of
life. His tongue hangs out. Plaster blood gushes from the neck.
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My legs get weak. I sit down and read the writing on the walls. Tacked
there is a bit of serial porn drawn on scraps of Stouffer Hotel guest sta-
tionary and sent to Jackie through the mail. The envelope is without a
return address. There's a drawing of: 1.) Jackie dropping her panties while
sitting atop an audio console at a radio station. 2.) Jackie getting her
breasts licked by a stud with sunglasses and blond beard. 3.) Stud with
throbbing pink penis between Jackie's tits. And on and on. There are six
drawings accompanied by a a hand-lettered text. A sort of color commentary
followed by this post-script: "Actually, what happened is that I followed you
into a gas station tonight and was too shy to try to kiss you. Or ask you to
come home with me. So, I drew you and me. Next time I'm here, I want to do
this on the hood of your car."

"Too shy?" I think. It's difficult to believe that he's putting Jackie on a
pedestal. Not when the drawings emphasize that Romeo's love object exists
between his legs.

I'm relieved at the letter's suggestion that Jackie is a healthy heterosexual.
It's display hints at her enjoying the muse of the chase, yet to what kind of
man would she surrender? The answer is evidenced in a cosmology of Elvis
playing cards, also tacked upon the wall. These feature "The King" in karate
uniform, silk shirts and various Son-of-Liberace regalia. On the sink is a
candle featuring a picture of St. Michael slaying the dragon. The message
is simple. The woman is looking for a champion. I flush the toilet. My head
swirls. I ask myself, what kind of man am I?

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"...a certain anti-intellectual component of this self-confidence ...worries
some art professionals."
From "Houston Art", by Jamey Gambrell
Art in America, April '87

Jake keeps telling me that Jackie is crazy. Bossy. A ballbuster and a man
hater. Jackie confides that Jake is driving her crazy. The recent bashing by
the Detroit critic has aggravated his organic Latin explosiveness. Sparks
are ready to fly. In the House of Weapons. Think about it.

The table is set for leadership. I know the recipe but don't have the per-
sonal ingredients. This might someday make me a great art critic, in which
case I'll write kindly about my buddy. But for the moment, in a number of
ways, I can't help him.

Jackie herds us into her car. She has events planned and has entered us in
each of them. What the hell. It's her rodeo.

She drives us to Scott Prescott's house. When we arrive he's in a tree.
Hanging a pulley on a branch. Underneath is a Pontiac Firebird that has
been shrunk to a one-seater. The same maestro job of welding has given it
wings, rudder and jet intake. In the cockpit is an Atari steering wheel.
Scott descends to give us a nod and put his dog in his truck. The dog, like
the car, is a hybrid. A mix of Great Dane and pit bull. Scott breeds them.

Scott's front yard is an arsenal of dark humor. It looks like an Aryan
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Nation junkyard as interpreted by Thurgood Marshall on LSD. In it is a
Chevrolet Impala with a howitzer coming out of the windshield. Painted in a
jungle motif. It has tank treads on each set of three back wheels and a
siren mounted on top. Machine gun barrels protrude everywhere. It's called
"The Ghetto Blaster," and has been featured in national magazines as well as
car shows. It rests in martial harmony with an anti-aircraft gun aimed
towards heaven from a makeshift porch. Above it is a camoflauge canopy. All
of this in a residential neighborhood. Next door, a Mexican in a cowboy hat
cuts his lawn.

Aside the Ghetto Blaster is a Houston police car. It had been demolished
for a movie. Eventually Scott joins us inside it. We share a beer. Scott
tells that immediately upon recieving the car his friends removed the
backseat to plunder the marijuana that panic-stricken prisoners had stashed
there. The moment is ripe for war stories. I want to hear about Scott's
recent trip to Belize, but he has to hurry off. Tonight, he's going to play
hockey. With a group of homeboys who play the Canadian National Sport on
rollerskates.

Rollerskating is big in Texas. Scott said that once he was given a ticket
for hitting a pedestrian while skating. That the charge was negligent
collision. And that it went on his driving record. With this note Scott
takes leave. I watch him enter his house wearing overalls and jackboots. He
looks like a dirt farmer. A man of menial mind. But I know better. He is,
I'm certain, the Bull Goose Looney of the Houston underground.

I can't help but see Scott in the light of my own inability to lead. His mere
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presense makes wine from the sour grapes between Jake and Jackie. Oh godsend!
Oh Savior! The Second Coming is here! And Scott is...Randall Patrick
McMurphy reincarnated.

Maybe, I think, he's God the Father. Ken Kesey himself.

Jackie and Scott's sense of public theater, as exhibited in outrageously
customized vehicles, brings to mind Kesey's Merry Pranksters of 1966. Who
toured the country in the original psychedelic bus. They got their elan and
muscle from Kesey's ability to mobilize the art sissies and heathen meatheads.
And invite them both into the crew. Kesey mixed the artist's ebullient
romanticism with the warrior's lethal reflexes. Scott has similar vision.
And similar talent. I see it in a euphoric revelation that has noth- ing to
do with the Budweiser I've drunk.

Witness: Scott built the rocketmobile for performance art. Its short run
at fame was climaxed by being crashed into a wall. Firebuckets inside were
lit. In an event which tantalized both aesthetic and destructive fancies.
Witness: the outdoor hockey games of which Scott was a main organizer. More
Texas art on wheels. Who can say that cowboys playing hockey on
rollerskates isn't a folk art happening akin to The Bluegrass Boys playing
Pharoah Saunders? Witness: the runaway contempt for demagogery that provoked
Scott, the welder of a portable cross that can be burnt on a nocturnal tour
of the city, to make templates of a cracker sucking a black man's banana and
spray paint the image along the route of a recent Ku Klux Klan parade.

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What more need be said? I get an awfully large impression of Scott in a
very short time. One flew east, one flew west, and one flew over the
cuckoo's nest. Scott Prescott, meanwhile, landed in Houston.

"I was sent to Texas to save the savages, but now that I've seen their stench
and thoughts...I say fuck you!"
From the men's room of La Carafe
Recipient of Texas Historical Commision Official Medallion.

That night we drive downtown. Jake and I travel in the backseat of Jackie's
car, while she and a Mexicana named Toni occupy the seats of authority. This
arrangement unnerves my maleness. Apparently, we aren't trophies enough to
be seated aside them. And I don't I feel like we're being chauffered in
honor. I feel like baggage.

We pass around a bottle of Cuervo, then park. Walk to Diverseworks. An art
gallery where the churchmice are preparing for a show by the Gorilla Girls.
The paintings and installations line the walls like Stations of the Cross.
Oh, the weight of womanhood. This, I think, is the femilitancy that drives
a white male into the citadel of Reagandom. But I'm quiet and pious while
Jackie is neither. She proclaims the artwork boring. I meekly ask Jackie
if this opinion makes her Thomas Sowell or Louis Farakahn.

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Jackie sneers with helpless, categorical contempt. I feel like a jester who
has slipped one past the queen. Pride satisfied, I look at my shoes. Bow
my head. Avoid inquiry.

Jackie keeps bragging about the the pig lady's house. It's a porcine grotto,
a shrine to pigdom, decorated as such after the woman's swimming porker
rescued a drowning boy. The house represents innocence. Purity. Folk
art. Done not to the tune of an ideological torchsong or the jingle of mone-
tary reward, but rather to the nails-across-the-chalkboard sound of acute
eccentricity. The owner is arguably insane. And inarguably one of Jackie's
heros. I sense that the pig lady laid the spiritual/intellectual
foundation for "Jackie's House of Weapons" and Scott Prescott's house. I
sense that she's the cornerstone of a movement. And that what she really
needs is a ghostwriter to handle her memoirs.

Jackie thinks that museums are art cemetaries. She thinks that galleries are
rest homes. To her, high art means low heart. Jake is forced to plead his
case. He says he wants to get into a profitable gallery so he can upgrade
his quality of life. He wants to move up from generic peanut butter to
Skippy's. He'd like to, when his ship comes in, be able to afford "crunchy".

Afterwards we walk to the Alfred Thomson Convention Center to watch the guys
play hockey on the valet ramp. Scott never arrives. Jackie sits with a
player who tells a joke so loudly that it seems to be directed at Jake and me.
A blind rabbit runs across a snake and is asked to identify it. The rabbit
ponders, "Well, it is long and slimey like a dick but has no balls.
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Therefore, it must be a LAWYER."

Lawyer, I think, is that a code word for Yankee?

I hear that joke over and over again at La Carafe, where we went for beer
after the game. This same hockey player has parked himself at our table. Up
close I see his curly brown hair. Green eyes. Two dead teeth. He speaks
more against lawyers. Then against his last two wives. "The last one has
been with her new boyfriend a long time. Apparently, she's happy. I think I
know what his secret is. He beats her. Hell, if I'd a known that's what it
took to keep her around I'd a...I mean I can't tell you the number of times I
felt like punching her in the face. All she had to do was ask!"

When he's through pummeling marriage and lawyers he goes on about snow
niggers. Now his talk is blatantly directed at us. "Snow niggers are like
hemmoroids," he says, "tolerable in as much as they don't stay around too
long."

Who can tolerate, encourage and even champion this kind of boorishness?
Nobody but a true friend, a role for which Jake and I certainly don't qualify.
With this comedian is a buddy with the look and feel of Billy Carter on a
steady diet of John Wayne movies. His name is Wuz. He chain- smokes, laughs
and drinks from the pitchers Jake and I buy. He puts his arm around me.
"I'm happy you can take a joke," he says, "and it's a good thing. Because if
you don't like it, you can step outside. Nothing personal, it's just that me
and my homeboy have the right to be ourselves."

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We leave. The two guys get into a welder's truck. Its bed and cabin have
been stripped and repainted into a kind of gentleman's wagon. It shines with
the romantic aura of a new bottle of cologne. It's double back wheels give
it the wide, full haunches of a blue-ribbon steer. As the comedian rolls
down his window, a pit bull sticks it's head out and yaps death threats The
clutch is popped and the musclebound truck lays a weak patch. The comedian
screams through his smile, "Snow niggers go home!"

We drop Toni off and return to the House of Weapons. Jackie tells us not to
worry about the redneck, that he's an ugly aberration on the scene.
Kind of, I think, like a hemmoroid. Jake meanwhile, insists that everyone
in Houston is crazy. Finally, for the first time today, I side with him. He
has my fullest sympathy.

We go upstairs. Jackie brings us foam pads and blankets. I sleep on the
floor and dream that I'm starring in Texas Chainsaw Massacre #13. That my
throat is being shredded by the comedian from La Carafe. His pit bull
sticks its face into the bloody roostertail as if at a drinking fountain.
The killer's idiot friend laughingly tells me not to take this punishment
per- sonally. Meanwhile, Jackie stands on the side trying to figure out if
this event is folk art or foul play. The question doesn't faze her. She's
thrilled at the possibility of a "Murder Bedroom"

"Scott Prescott," I cry in my sleep, "where are you?"

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