2006-02-13 - 10:50 a.m.
There's been nothing to write about for 81 days, according to my records here-- well, that's not true; there's been plenty that I could have written about, but nothing that I wanted to write about. Trust me, you wouldn't have wanted to hear about it anyway.
However, this weekend I finally did something worth reporting on: I actually got out of the car in Johnson City, TX, and walked around (instead of driving straight the hell through it as fast as possible on the way to somewhere else, as is usually done). If you live in a small town in the South, this will hold no charm for you whatever-- if I had to live in Johnson City, TX, I'd have started running long ago and never looked back. But I don't, and I didn't have to stay (thank God), so the whole thing was relatively interesting.
The whole point of going there, with which you will no doubt sympathize, was to get a beer. We'd spent a grueling morning jumping over rocks and water at Pedernales Falls (pronounced in the local vernacular as "Perdenales," to my eternal despair), and after you do that, you need beer, and it was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and Perdenales is in a dry county, and so the logical thing to do was visit the nearest human settlement in a wet county, and that was Johnson City, TX. It's also the birthplace of my favorite ever President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, as one or two people know. So the place, you'll understand, has a sort of magnetic charm for me. That, and the fact that the last time we drove through it we noted two smiling mannequins on the balcony of the Feed Mill Restaurant-- a prostitute, as God is my witness, and a-- I cringe, but this is what it was-- a squaw. Seriously.
So we got to Johnson City, and got out of the car, and found-- nothing. The place is a ghost town. All the storefronts you drive past on 290 on your way to somewhere else-- they all have signs up ("Feed, Cotton, Chicken Wire"), and you just drive by figuring they all have feed, cotton and chicken wire inside them-- but they don't. When you get out and look, you find that they're completely empty-- no furnishings, no dusty shelves, nothing but sunlight slanting through dusty air. Every single one. Even the Feed Mill restaurant, which has a sort of fabulous Socialist Realism mural on the side (if they only knew what Socialist Realism was, they'd die), is for sale, "with or without business." The only shred of commercial life was a smattering of gloomy galleries-- there, presumably, to snap up tourist traffic overflowing from the totally deserted Lyndon B. Johnson Historical Park, a squat seventies-looking brown state-parkish building without a single car in front.
People still live in Johnson City, though, and you figure when people live in a place like that, they have to drink-- so we drove around towards what we hoped was the town square (it sort of was) and there, across from the courthouse, we found it: The Bar. As I recall, the sign was sort of sloppily hand-painted and tacked crookedly on something. There was a truck outside The Bar, a big dusty red one with a tool-box in the back and a gun-rack that probably actually gets used. There was one window, heavily tinted with a big crack across it, and the suspicion of a lit-up neon beer sign shining dimly from inside, possibly-- but where the other windows should have been, there was only plywood and duct-tape. We did not go into The Bar. Instead we drove through all three back-streets of Johnson City, admiring the big rigs parked in everybody's front yards-- I guess that's what you do there now: you're a trucker. We counted yard signs for the Republican candidate for Justice of the Peace-- and even those were sort of shabby and badly done. Pervasive, though, for whatever that's worth. I hope compassionate conservatism is working out for them.
As far as I could tell, the only going commercial venture in the city, other than The Bar, was the Super S food store and the Dollar General, squashed together in a dingy strip mall. And I think they have a church. Is that a commercial venture?
Anyway, we got back into the car and hurried back to Austin to drink, but it was an interesting excursion. I've never been in a place like that. Depressing as hell, and not really worth writing about, but I was sort of pleased, so I thought I'd pass it on.
Note on your calendars: Feb. 22 is the birthday of Sen. Edward Kennedy. I recommend rum and Coke, personally, to toast this bastion of liberalism with a past not unlike that of our fine Presidenter. I recommend lots of it. Just don't... oh, never mind. I was going to be in bad taste. If you can finish that sentence, I'll be glad of your company in Hell.
Pravda,
Nina.
