Catfish Reef Well, here on lower Milam Street, the three-hundred block, mostly respectable, is called Milamstrasse--so named by Teddy Buck, who runs a store specializing in clothes for fat men. Teddy has been acclaimed Burgomeister of Milamstrasse by his neighbors.
These include Bichon’s Drug store, our town’s main hoo-doo supply house, where black-cat floor wash sells for two dollars and a half in the large economy size. Here citizens who dabble in mojo and hoodoo can buy such innocuous items as dragon-blood sticks, for luck; wonder-of-the-world root, for locating treasures; and sweet mama shakeup, to encourage romance. If you need something a little stronger, you can get oil of bendover, Adam and Eve root, spirit oil, Chinese business powder, black-cat perfume, five finger grass, lodestones, steel filings, easy-life powder, controlling oil, anger powder, mad water, high-john-the-conqueror root, and getaway powder.
Bichon’s sells drugs too, including some proprietary preparations bearing the store owner’s label: Bichon’s Liniment, Mouth Wash, Cough Syrup, Sanitive Wash, Hydralto Injection, and so on. but hoodoo goods are the best sellers, with candles leading--from van-van tapers, for luck, priced at three dollars a dozen, to death candles, at ten dollars each.
There are black devil candles, for getting shed of enemies; Louisiana occult candles in assorted colors, for various uses; and three wick candles, in red for business, green for work, and pink or blue for love, depending on the sex of the objective. Master candles, at three dollars each, are supposed to enable you to master any situation. But it’s the death candle that will slay you, the folks who believe in hoodoo tell me. This comes in the shape of a coffin containing a doll ten inches tall--male or female. Light the wick, name the doll for an enemy, and if the hoodoo works he will expire with the last guttering flame.
The next corner , at Preston Avenue, is the place where Fenderbender White used to make his headquarters.
Fenderbender would stand around with a big toolbox that had a sign on the side: STOP ME--FENDERS STRAIGHTENED WHILE YOU WAIT. He was very good at his trade, and his prices were considerably lower than those of the regular body-and-fender shops, but the law frowned upon the noise he made, and he finally vanished.
The four-hundred block, where the Four Hundred never go, is called Catfish Reef.
The Reef is bi-racial. The light and the dark meet here. Generally speaking, the odd numbers, on the east side, are dark, the even numbers light; but the exception proves the rule.
You can buy practically anything here. Whiskey, gin. wine, beer, a one hundred and fifty dollar suit, firearms, a four bit flop, a diamond bracelet that will look equally good on the arm of a chaste woman or a fun-gal. You can buy fried catfish in Catfish Reef. You can buy reefers on the Reef.
Or you can, get faded, get your picture made, your shoes shined, your hair cut, your teeth pulled. You can get your teeth knocked out for free. You can buy lewd pictures, and in the honkytonks you can arrange for the real thing. The reef is a quietly cruel street, where rents are high and laughter comes easy, where violence flares quickly and briefly in the neon twilight, and if a dream ever comes true it’s apt to be a nightmare.
Fred and Winnie Morris Back on the ground in this alabaster city after a trip across the golden Spanish leagues of the Texas heartland, I, although more than twenty years a newsmonger on the asphalt prairies, am a wide eyed cub again.
I am awed by the new filigreed-steel mesas rising above the concrete canyons; startled by the boogie of pile drivers and jackhammers, lighthearted at the glitter of the Neon forest, the gossamer summer styles already revealing the cold, brittle charms of plaster mannequins, the mink-dyed muskrat still sheathing the warm pink ladies milling along Main on tack-hammer heels, casually intent on some foolish errand, or hurrying like animated, nylon-stemmed flowers to a rendezvous with vanity or frivolity or a hot range in a suburban kitchen beside a sink full of washed-up dreams.
Now, with me, hit the Gulf Freeway. On that six-lane roller coaster you can drive the fifty miles to blue water in less than an hour. But turn left, instead, in the rodeo-wild traffic, burn the breeze on the La Porte Expressway, and inhale the billion-dollar perfume or our town--Ship Channel Number Five, essence of cauliflower simmering over the brimstone pits of hell.
On the La Porte Road, peer through the smog curtain and wonder which gray pylon on the eastern horizon is a monument to Sam Houston and the liberators of Texas, and which a smokestack sending up pale, foul incense to the gods of industry. Skim through the Martian landscape of Deer Park, where the shell refinery’s big cat-cracker hisses and fumes at the frightened herring gulls cruising up-bayou from San Jacinto Bay.
Take the Battleground Road. Drive slowly and with humility across the shadow of the tallest monument, where Deef Smith the scout rode up behind Sam Houston and cried, “Fight for your lives, boys! Vince’s Bridge is down!” and the mercer boys, Eli and Elijah, chased an enemy platoon into Peggy Lake and made them remember the Alamo.
And, although the Washburn Tunnel would have been faster, roll down to the choppy tidewater and ease onto the deck of a six-car ferry and cross the bayou to Nate Lynch’s landing, now called Lynchburg.
At Lynchburg, across the road from an oil tank-farm, on fifteen acres of emerald pasture sloping down to the neck of Burnet Bay, live Fred and Winnie Morris, with their horses, dogs, cattle, hogs, turkey, geese, ducks, chickens, and memories. Fred Morris was born on this land sixty years ago. He hopes to die here, and in peace. Winnie was born in Lynchburg. She has a big box of arrowheads that she has picked up on the Morris beach over the years--Karankawa arrowheads, some of them maybe, used by the giant cannibal Indians that Jim Long’s wife, Jane the Mother of Texas, fought off, unassisted, from her lonely fort on Bolivar Point.
It’s pleasant in the Morris kitchen late of an afternoon, with the San Jacinto Monument, yonder across the bay, holding aloft its proud Lone Star, like a priest elevating the Blessed Sacrament; the ships sliding up and down the Channel, the cool, wet wind in your hair; and Fred Morris telling of the days in his youth, when Buffalo Bayou was so full of buffalo fish that seiners had to dump half of every catch to keep it light enough to handle.
“I could go down to the beach, yonder, through a fine orchard of peaches, plums, and pears,” says Fred, “and catch me a fine mess of speckled trout, redfish, crabs, or shrimp any old time. But nothing can live in the bayou now, and the air pollution has killed all my fruit trees. If I had my way, I’d tear down all the factories and refineries and chemical plants and not let any more steamships come up the bayou.”
You can remind Fred that all that makes his land more valuable--not only these fifteen acres but a nearby bayou-bank parcel and ten more acres in industrial Pasadena.
“Yes,” he admits, his blue eyes swimming, “but I don’t like all this modern life. I’d swap all of my land except five acres to live on, if I could just call back the past.”
But you can’t do that Fred Morris. Because back in the scuffling city at the end of the Freeway a hundred thousand wheels of fortune are spinning. A million individual dreams are down and wagered. The dolls whose mink coats kept them warm in the South Coast winter will need springtime silks to keep them cool, and a hundred thousand tons of air-conditioning, so that they won’t sweat in the terrible Texas summer. The working stiffs need new tires for their old cars, and their wives need new housedresses, and the kids need shoes and tonsillectomies. Even for the dingbats and hustlers on skidrow, it is absolutely necessary that we keep building everything bigger and noisier and more complex along the bayou where the buffalo fish used to swim.
Albert’s Cats Deep in the heart of the Reef, and on the darker side, is a labrinthine establishment, run by a mild-mannered little squarehead named Martin Nelson, that does business as a photo, recording, and shoeshine parlor. The other morning a taxicab loaded to the dome with lean brown youths and musical instruments pulled up in front of this place. There is a taxi stand here, and concrete steps mount a curb four feet high. Five copper cents are imbedded in the concrete of the top step, and as the musicians piled out of the cab with their gear, each stepped on one of the coins for luck.
Lounging in the doorway, Shamrock the head bootblack paid no heed to the musicians. He was eying a bronze-skinned gal in a tight red dress who was mincing along the Reef. At fifty two, Sham is the dark Casanova of Milam-strasse. He can no more leave a good-looking woman be than a winehead can resist sweet Lucy.
Just inside, at the shine stand, four or five fancy Dans were getting their two-tones glossed up. A stomp number was throbbing on the jukebox, and Shamrock’s eager young bootblacks were slapping their polishing cloths in time to the music. Beyond the shine parlor, in the photo department, Mr. Nelson himself sat at his tinting desk beside the camera booth, eating a late lunch of stewed chicken wings and rice. Still farther back, past a curtained entrance, a dim light glowed in the recording studio, revealing the mellow wood of an upright piano, walls and chairs draped with exotic Oriental prints, and curious statuary standing about. Somehow, Nelson’s recording studio always makes me think of a back room in the Algiers Casbah.
Into the dark studio filed the musicians, toting their drums and their guitars. Bringing up the rear was the taxi driver, still in his uniform cap. He paused at the desk.
“Mr. Nelson,” he said, this-here is Albert’s Cats. Albert, that’s me. We wants to cut a round flat.”
“Cut , Cats,” said Mr. Nelson, working on a chicken wing with his front teeth. “Give me the sign when you’re sharp.”
Albert peered into the studio, where his Cats were deploying their forces. “Aint no more glim than that?” he asked.
“That’s all the fire department will let me have,” explained Mr. Nelson. “I thought cats could see in the dark.”
“Yassah,” said the taxi driver, and passed on into the shadows. Inside, he sat down at the piano and began working on the keys. He played unadulterated boogie, with an intoxicating rhythm, beating the keyboard like Kid Gavilan punching a bag.
One by one, the other Cats caught and held the beat on their drums and git-fiddles. The music was deafening. You could no longer hear the jukebox, nor the sound of traffic outside. “Hey, Cats, you’re too loud,” called Mr.Nelson. “You’ll cut that record right down to the turntable.”
But nobody heard him. And as the music increased in volume and tempo, a considerable gathering of boogie disciples began to assemble in the shine parlor and the photo department. Four young pachucos with sleepy eyes and hair worn long and slick came in to listen. Two young brown bucks, each with a pint of white port, came to sit on a bench, swig nips from their bottles, and pat their feet.
Out on the sidewalk, where it was still possible to converse, the head bootblack was sweet-talking the donie in the red rags. “Baby,” Sham was saying, “you and me could make music like that.”
Donie-gal rolled her eyes. “Go ‘way little man. I got a date with a man would make two of you. And here he come.”
Here, indeed, came a large man, macked out in sharp gray flannels, wearing a tan Homburg. He was black as a telephone, and had a zircon the size of a traffic light on the middle finger of his right hand. It looked like a jeweled brass knucks.
Shamrock looked the man in the eye. “Shine Jack?” he said.
Jack turned his back on Sham and took the gal in red by the arm. “Let’s go, baby,” he said. “Here’s a taxi right here.”
They climbed into the back of the empty taxicab, and the man leaned forward and began blowing the horn. It was scarcely audible above the throbbing of the piano, the guitars, and the drums. But the man kept pushing the horn.
Inside, at the piano, Albert was beating his heart out on the piano keys, listening to the wild counterpoint from his Cats. It was solid, he thought. It was time to cut wax. One day, he thought, he, Albert, would be as famous as Cab Calloway.
But at that moment a law-hawk in blue stalked into the shine parlor, shouting at the top of his voice. Nobody knew what he was saying, but by the time he reached the curtained doorway of the studio, the music had become pianissimo.
“You the driver of that cab out front?” the law-hawk asked Albert.
“Yassah,” Albert admitted, letting his fingers slide off the keys. “Aint nothing wrong. That there is a cab stand.”
“You aint standing , boy. You parked. You can’t park there, without you ready to take passengers. You got passengers.”
“We fixing to cut a record,” said Albert.
“You gonna be stubborn?” asked hawkshaw, reaching for his slapjack.
Albert sighed. “Nossah,” he said, and went out to his cab.
It was quiet on the Reef now. Shamrock, leaning against the doorjamb, watching the chick in red ride away with the big man, decided it was the music that had made him think she was for him. The music and the red dress. Now that she was out of sight, he realized that his feeling for her had run out as soon as the music stopped.
Sigman Byrd
