Austin Nights
door. I usually keep it open, especially in the gentle mornings, when the air outside isn’t scorched yet by the lingering day. I’m reading on the carpet directly in the sunlight coming through the sliding glass door when I glance at a giddy girl with eyeglasses walking toward our building. She has a childlike skip to her gait and she hums.
When she sees me reading she’s prompt to say, “Hi! I’m your new neighbor!”
“Hi,” I say back, talking to her from our bedroom when she’s on the grass below. It’s a little strange, but I figure she’s hyper friendly.
Bridget comes out of the closet with a plastic hanger and dress. I don’t know if the crazy girl sees her.
“I live right there!” and she points to the balcony next to ours.
I nod. I say, “Okay,” and then I half-wave.
She resumes humming and skips out of view. A few minutes later, I hear commotion in what I assume is her bedroom. She screams and catches her breath. She screams a little quieter. Then she sobs and pounds the carpet.
I imagine her in child’s pose.
Bridget is the first to suggest our neighbor has mental problems.
3
What’s insane about this drive is we’re going to have to turn the white Silverado right around and drive back to where we came from once we get to South Congress.
We may be going to Austin, but as soon as we get there, we’re going to have to head back east to Hollywood because the Silverado isn’t ours. It belongs to Jon, Bridget’s dad. He lets us borrow his ride to move our things from Miami Beach.
We do consider our options before committing to the Silverado route, knowing the Silverado will involve us being truckers for no less than a week.
Our other options are: [a] hire some shady mover, [b] rent a sixteen-foot moving truck, or else [c] rent an SUV, sell our stuff, use the money to rent a furnished place, and pray to dear Lord everything we want to take will fit.
Until the morning of our scheduled departure, we have settled on [c], to rent an SUV and drive separately to Austin, where we will return the SUV and stay with only our Civic coupe. Sounds peachy.
Not quite: enter the black swan.
The only available SUV is a glorified station wagon. Eternally optimistic, we put down the seats and assess the optimal cargo space. It won’t carry enough of our stuff to justify the rental.
More specifically, Bridget has an upright piano to think about.
We shake our heads to the Cuban behind the counter, express our regret at a lack of recourse, and cancel our order without being charged some nonsense fee.
What do we do now?
On the drive back to Miami Beach, Bridget calls her dad to explain the setback. He’s quick to agree to let us use his 2006 Chevy Silverado. All we have to do is get it at his house in Hollywood and drive it back to his house when we’re done.
Sounds peachy. We detour north to Broward County.
The Silverado is in Jon’s driveway, like he said. He took the Tri-Rail to his office. His wife, Cynthia, dropped him off at the station in the morning. Her shift doesn’t start until noon, so we catch her fresh and tender out of the shower, redolent of lavender. We touch cheeks and kiss the air by way of greeting. She gives us the key to Jon’s Silverado and says we’re loco for wanting to drive so much, but she wishes us the best.
“Thanks,” says Bridget. “We’ll be seeing you again soon!” Bridget laughs like this is some joke, but it’s not. Even though we’re driving so far, we’ll be back at this waterfront house in several days to return the Chevy.
I say goodbye to Cynthia after Bridget gives her a long hug. She watches us walk across her overgrown lawn.
“You want to drive your dad’s truck to Miami Beach?” I ask.
Bridget knows I’m not as comfortable as her when it comes to steering oversize vehicles through I-95 traffic.
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll follow you.”
The drive to the beach is zippy: I-95 South to I-195 East.
I listen to WVUM, which is 90.5 on the FM dial. University of Miami students run the station. The MCs talk like they’re in slow motion, but sometimes the music they play gives me goosebumps.
When we get to the I-195 junction, I slip down the middle lane of the freeway. A ramp slingshots me east, toward the glory land. Vodka advertisements cling to buildings on either side. Some have glass bottles upright between long legs. Then, in a hurry, civilization stays put and we’re on a bridge over the Intracoastal. Off in the distance, condominiums stare at the Atlantic, but to the north and south: saltwater, a lot of saltwater currents, and coconut islands, and boats moored to anchors.
Hot Chip serenades me with one of their intricate intros. I raise the volume and look all around at a cut of the bluest sky. Every time I reach this road, I want to shout the happiest sound in the world. This drive is unmatched. It’s latent with promise, a promise upon which only this place can deliver.
Then, the sign at the beginning of the island:
WELCOME TO
MIAMI BEACH
Palm trees wearing neon halos shoot up into the sky. I can smell the ocean. It’s in my nostrils, and from there it’s absorbed into my bloodstream.
3
Granddad scans my dorm room in his stitched sweater. He really does look dapper. I imagine how it must feel being him, having seen so much change. What I mean is, he knew Chicago back in the days when it was a big town with stockyard and trains. He participated in WWII, a frogman defusing underwater mines. He traveled the world, this octogenarian sitting calmly in my faux leather chair.
Granddad looks at my magazine cutout of Bob Dylan hanging over my bed, blowing his harmonica. He looks at a bowling pin I use as a bookend. He unfolds his hands to brush a silver hair off his forehead. He folds them again, elegantly.
“Think you’ll ever use these clubs?” asks Granddad, waggling my seven-iron.
I shake my head, “Not really. I’ll probably hit some pitch shots on the Midway, but a golf course is expensive on my budget.”
He visits me on a Sunday.
“You want to go to mass?” I ask. “There’s a Catholic chapel on University Avenue, not too far from here. We could walk there. I usually go with several friends.”
“Oh! I’d get to meet your friends?” asks Granddad. “I wonder what they’re like?”
To Granddad, the University of Chicago is an incubator for eccentrics to study and do something even more eccentric with their lives. It isn’t a vocational school. Students here, he always says, come weird and leave weirder. With 20/20 hindsight, I have to agree.
We cross the Midway Plaisance on our pilgrimage to Calvary Chapel. Granddad doesn’t do much in the way of talking or asking questions. He listens and laughs. When we pass the oxidized statue of Carl Linnaeus, I see him decipher the latinized name of the ennobled Swedish naturalist. In his younger days, Granddad would’ve climbed this statue and spent the day reading an account of the Middle Ages. This would’ve been his spot for ruminating on the passage of time. He would’ve grown ponderous and wrinkled sitting on the unwavering coattails of Linné – alas, not in this lifetime. The medieval carillons and lágrimas will have to be postponed indefinitely. Sorry, Granddad, but today you must be pious with me and a sampling of my friends.
Although the name on Pepe’s birth certificate is Michael, everyone calls him Pepe because he always wears Pepe Jeans cotton tees.
Pepe hails from San Antonio, a terribly bigoted place.
Pepe’s father is a bearded, small press poet of regional renown.
From Pepe, I learn why the sky is typically blue.
I also learn Windows, the operating system, sucks.
Pepe claims to sleep no more than a couple hours a day. It’s exceedingly common to see him roaming the halls of Matthews House during the witching hours. If you leave your door open, he’ll pop in uninvited and unheard, like the Cheshire Cat. He shocks many girls this way, leaning against their open doors and waiting a little bit before making his presence kno
wn. To compensate for his refusal to sleep he can also be seen at all hours of the day planted deep in the lounge, indulging in what he claims are catnaps on the only wallowing chair. The one place he’s seldom found is in the bathroom. He performs all hygienic duties on the sly, and it gets to be a juicy question in Matthews House how often he showers.
Common consensus is once every ten days, but no one actually sees Pepe entering or leaving the shower. Dandruff is a serious issue for him. On days when he wears dark Pepe Jeans cotton tees, white flakes are conspicuous around his collar. But these don’t embarrass him in the least, and I observe him on more than one occasion use his hands to flick his shoulders clean without a hiccup in his discourse.
Granddad, however, prefers the company of Liz and Jenny. In mass, he listens closely to them singing, and after the priest wraps things up with go now to love and serve in peace, or some similar words, Granddad asks everyone if they’d care to grab a bite to eat somewhere in Hyde Park, on him.
Rather than answer, Pepe clears his parched throat, settles into his jeans, and flicks some dandruff off his shoulder.
“I’m sure there’s a place you like in the neighborhood?” prompts Granddad, turning to the girls.
Jenny speaks, “Oh, thanks, Walter, but I’ve put off a ton of reading for today.”
Liz seconds.
Granddad takes me to a Mexican joint on 53rd St with a neon jalapeño in its window. We talk about Chicago and James Joyce and Mamma. I listen to his discourse on how the Irish saved civilization. Then we