I don't read the Houston Press, our local weekly, as much as I used to. I find the old excuses work the best: no time, not enough time, and even less time available to read it. There's also probably an element of professional jealousy, meaning: I'm jealous of those who write professionally. I suppose it helps that I generally like the quality of writing I see in their film reviews, Wilonsky and Weinkauf especially.
So it's always a nice surprise to come upon something like John Nova Lomax's chronicle of his sojourn down the length of Westheimer, on foot, with his friend Geoffrey "Uncle Tick" Muller. How daunting a task is this?
Not from the Loop to Midtown, nor from the Beltway either. By "all the way," I mean just that -- start from where the No. 53 "Westheimer Limited" Metro bus turns around at West Oaks Mall and Highway 6, and then pound the pavement of the entire 16-plus miles, eight zip codes and three U.S. congressional districts, all the way to where Westheimer gives way to Elgin in Midtown.
You might be asking yourself why someone would take on such a challenge. The day after the slog, awaking with blistered feet and sore to the bone, I was wondering the same thing myself. I doubted anyone else had done it, for starters. I also did it because I wanted the physical challenge. I have recently lost about 20 or 30 pounds, and while I'm still no Lance Armstrong -- I could probably stand to shed about 30 or 40 more pounds -- I felt my relatively svelte self needed a test. I just hoped my thighs wouldn't chafe, and thanks to Dr. Atkins, they didn't.
But above all else, I wanted to see if I would gain any insights into H-Town's soul. Westheimer, more than any other thoroughfare, embodies Houston's car-enamored, zoning-free ethos, a damn-near 20-mile phantasmagoria of strip malls, storage facilities, restaurants, big-box retail, office parks, apartment complexes, strip clubs, malls, supermarkets and the occasional church.
Indeed, one could live their entire life purely within the confines of this fabled road and never want for anything, from quality comic books to high-end golf supplies to the best lap dances southeast Texas has to offer.
I've taken a number of ill-advised urban treks of my own. My personal favorite was a late-night hike in February of 1988 from the University of Texas' Jester Dormitory down Congress to Ben White Blvd. and back, a roundtrip of just over six miles (the journey was precipitated by a really meaningful fight with my freshman girlfriend). I hit the road around midnight, and by the time I wandered back to my room (around 5 AM), the cops had stopped me - twice, I'd been offered a ride by a dude who was the spitting image of Redd Foxx, and an English guy tried to pick me up so many times I had to threaten him with physical violence to get him to leave me alone.[1]
In retrospect, the walking ensemble consisting of ripped jeans, a black leather jacket, and black cowboy boots probably screamed "Joe Buck." At least I wasn't wearing a cowboy hat.
But enough about me, how did Lomax's trip go?
So, had we found the soul of Houston? Yes, I would have to say that we did, such as it is. It's ugly, preposterous and inhuman, interspersed with all-too-rare pockets of serenity and beauty. It smells like roasting corn, raw sewage, fish sauce, frying hamburgers and exhaust. (Heavy on the exhaust.) There's sex and God at one end of it and plain old sex at the other. It's chic and tacky, humble and proud. It's Vietnamese, Mexican, Korean, black, white, Muslim and Christian, macho and effete, alive and dead, Red State and Blue. It sounds like the whooshing of cars, and if you close your eyes, you can delude yourself into believing they're waves lapping at a beach. It's the American dream, and it's a prison. And it's got the best sweet tea.
I hate sweet tea, but otherwise he's pretty much on the money.
[1] His swinging technique consisted of telling me he'd already slept with an American woman,and nailing an American man would make his trip complete. Or words to that effect. Hey, I'm sure I've used worse.
I used a line similar to that in London once… “I’ve already had sex with one Englishman and I’d like to find out if you’re all pussies.”
Remind me to tell you sometime about my 3-man canoe adventure to find the magical, mythical source of Lake Woodlands. To this day, I still don’t believe how it ended up.
(For those that don’t know, it’s a man-made lake…and, yes, we knew that going in. That made our findings all the more mind-boggling.)