America at Last – Part 18

Austin, Texas

Made me smile just writing that sub-heading, and I feel myself transported back. Sun and scattered clouds, but even in May the temperature is building and the shirt is sticking to my back and just pulling my case from the big Ford taxi to the motel entrance is a chore. They say it’s a small world, but it’s the opportunities that take some finding. Sure seems a long way from Somerset today.

We’d picked up a cab into town from the Greyhound station out on the Interstate. Back in the station car park there’d been some kind of a hot-rod meet going on with custom cars and T-Buckets gleaming in the sun. Our cab was big, flat and beat-up and loped along through the traffic past the Longhorns football stadium, drawing up outside the La Quinta motel on East 11th Street, just a stone’s throw from the State Capitol building.

The figure of Lyndon Baines Johnson looms large over Austin. Elsewhere, he is something of a forgotten President. Writing in 2013, his tenure seems distant, lost in memory behind more recent incumbents like the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama; eclipsed by the stature and notoriety of Reagan and Nixon, and lacking an era as afforded to Eisenhower. He had the misfortune to take office as Vice-President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy – force in life and legend in death.

Under the Obama Presidency, he is newsworthy because of the battle to scrap Medicare and Medicaid, a central pillar of the social welfare system that Johnson introduced in America. The former is likely to disappear to be replaced by a voucher system and the latter will see its budget gradually cut. One thing that has stood out as we have travelled the southern United States is the extent of poverty among Americans. Johnson grew up among the poor of the South and his response was to introduce a vast social programme for a vision he called “The Great Society”. It is this association that is largely lost outside the US.

When I was a child, the big enduring news stories were the war in Vietnam and the Apollo moon landings. The war and the dramatic developments of the Manned Space Programme that would culminate in the landings happened mainly under Johnson’s Presidency, yet both in a way overshadowed him. Growing up, I knew all about Kennedy and couldn’t avoid Nixon, even before his resignation, but the name of Lyndon Johnson never really entered my world. I only learned of “The Great Society” at university many years later. Channel 4’s superb early documentary “Vietnam” provided much to augment the visuals and headlines that I absorbed as a child. A key point being the distraction the war became to Johnson’s programme of social change.

And so I felt compelled to visit the LBJ Presidential Library. On the morning of our first full day in Austin, we climbed aboard one of the frequent and plentiful buses plying the city’s streets and headed up to the University of Texas, Austin. The campus is open and pleasant and on a grassy rise behind a tall fountain stands the striking modernist building that holds the Library. Shining white in the Texan sun, it looks like the command post for an alien invasion. The upper storey seems to be scanning the city, ready to devour it. Once inside, we found a broad reception area, staffed by smartly dressed Southern ladies, whose friendly greeting and helpfulness belied the stark exterior. We were registered as visitors and shown where to take the elevator to the upper floors.

The walls are lined with photographs, many of scenes I recollect from watching the news back home. The story tracks the history of Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, from their early years. Only Lady Bird attended the university, which is why the building is officially in her name. Johnson had a college education, becoming a journalist, which blew my idea of him being a Texan oilman. He was a gifted politician, though, and was soon noticed and destined for Washington. But LBJ was a Southern man, deeply moved by the Southern poverty he had seen and his ambition was to do something about it. He was a force in his own right and could maybe have made it to the White House alone, but against advice agreed to become Kennedy’s running-mate in the 1960 election year. The rest is history.

I got a feel for the man as we wandered through the displays and watched the narrated footage in the theatre. A lot of gaps were filled in my understanding of the times, the man and my view of myself in the world. Lady bird Johnson was a tremendous pillar of support and more. She was the engine of much of the change herself, throwing her own energy into bringing about what might be the nearest the United States has ever come to social democracy. It’s arguable that without someone like Johnson in the White House, America’s fight for Civil Rights might have been longer and bloodier.

As we walked back out into the sunshine past the fountain I felt dwarfed. But it wasn't only the great concrete monolith. Invisible to my childish eyes, events of enormous magnitude had been taking place as I sat and ate my tea while my dad watched the news. Images of Apollo launches and the bravery of American helicopter pilots drawing fire on the ground stick in my mind. But masked by all of that and unknown to me, there was monumental humanitarian ambition at work.

I don’t remember what Natasha and I discussed walking down the lawn and through the campus. Sometimes, there’s not much to say. We took a little retail therapy on The Drag where the university’s students shop and hang out. I bought a couple of second-hand shirts and a pair of Lennon sun-glasses from a girl who had just completed a university exchange at Burberry headquarters in London. We ate in the Burrito Bowl café before locating the post office where we stood in an orderly queue to buy stamps for postcards home. There was something about the queue and the busy diligence of the staff that reminded me very much of our own post offices.

In the afternoon, we took a bus down to SoCo, South Congress Avenue, over the Colorado River. SoCo is big, wide and sunny. I watched a Harley go by, high bars, long hair blowing in the wind, no crash helmet. The exhaust note seemed to travel more freely in the dry heat. I could fit in here. Along one side of the highway are a couple of recommended hang-outs – cafes and bars. We stopped off for coffee and a cake, then headed into a couple more clothes shops – I was still on a cowboy boot mission. I walked out wearing a black Stetson hat. Hats are funny things – for me anyway – and most hats just don’t work, but this one just felt right and, you know?

On the way back into town, my ego was inadvertently inflated as we walked by a busker we’d given a tip to earlier. He seemed to be wearing little more than a pair of dungarees several sizes too big and a hat. He had a Jack Russell sitting at his feet. We said Hi! and he stopped me. “Say, do you know how to tune a guitar?” “Yeah, sure” I replied and I showed him how to tune one string to the other, for which he was genuinely grateful. We exchanged smiles and he struck up another Bluegrass tune. I might be able to tune a guitar, but I sure wish I could play one like that.

Austin is known for its bars and its music scene – mostly contemporary. It also prides itself on being different – cars carry the bumper sticker “Keep Austin Weird”. Nature gives its stamp of approval with a nightly display of roosting bats leaving Congress Bridge over Lady Bird Lake. Crowds gather to watch countless thousands of them smoke their way off into the night.

6th Street is where most of the music happens. They say you can see a live band every night of the week. On our first night, we’d gone looking for music and something to eat. Through a small wooden door we walked into a dark gothic cavern with full-on American Metal playing and small groups sitting around tables or at the bar. We bought our beers and found a place to sit. Food was ordered from a small hatch down beyond the bar. They claimed to sell America’s best burgers. The place was busy. The range of burgers was bewildering. But not as bewildering as what was playing on the ubiquitous TV screens. It was some kind of epic Goth porn movie featuring ritualistic S&M interspersed with brutality, torture and killing. There was more raw meat on the screen than in the kitchen. The whole thing ended with the set burning to the ground around the cast, at which point the burgers arrived. They were good.

The evenings were spent along 6th Street and on the shared terrace at La Quinta, smoking, chatting and drinking the odd beer. Our final night was spent on 6th watching a fantastic set by a young Hendrix / Santana, who seemed to have turned tuning his guitar into a religious rite. Still, he could get the place dancing, witness the ageing but lively couple in lycra shorts dancing to Johnny B. Goode. On the way out, we dropped some change into the obligatory tip box and shook hands, chatting for a while with the guitarist. So friendly.

We joined in the pub quiz next door where our lack of general knowledge quickly bonded us with the regulars. The barman even stood us a drink. We ate hot wings at four dollars a plate and admired the wooden bar, shipped in from Dublin. The evening was seen out witnessing a Proclaimers-style combo committing mass murder of the Beatles catalogue. Our new friends begged us to stay and endure it with them, but there’s a time to leave. We left one of them fumbling for the keys to his Ranchero as he finished-off his final beer.

The morning saw us being picked up in the hot sunshine by a cab. The driver, a tall wiry black man in late middle-age stood by and watched as we lifted the cases into the trunk. He pulled aside some jump-leads and a bent piece of metal. “Know what this is?” he asked picking up the metal bar. We didn’t. “It’s what I use when people call me out because they’re locked out of their car. I had one once with a baby in there. Been in there so long in the heat it passed out. Lady was panicking and fretting like crazy. I just slip the bar in and open the door. Easy.”

We nodded our appreciation and climbed in the back. Inside, the body odour hit us between the eyes. This was going to be a long ride. As we pulled out onto the road, the driver asked where we were from and we picked up a conversation. He had a friendly, laid back manner and told us a little about Austin as we worked through the traffic. He told us he’d been a schoolteacher, teaching maths. He’d taught in a number of cities across the US and was now retired, aged seventy-five. So that’s why he didn’t rush to manhandle the cases. His kids were grown up. He’d had seven in total and only the youngest, still in school, now lived in Texas.

He shared with us the principle that he handed down to his kids: “You can live at home without board and lodging provided you are still in school or studying. If you have a job, you pay. If you don’t have a job, keep studying until you have the qualifications to get one, then you pay or leave home.”

It seemed to work. Some had gained prestigious scholarships at University of Texas and elsewhere. Several had been through Medical School, one still studying out on the West Coast. One was a linguist studying for a PhD. in Japanese dialects out in Japan. I thought about my prejudices as we spoke.

He told us he loves the South and we talked about Martin Luther King Jr. He said he thought that without Lyndon Johnson providing the administrative leverage, not so much would have been achieved. We talked about the injustices that still persist. How the criminal justice system is still set against black people. He told us of how a man who is wrongly convicted may not be released when the true perpetrator is found and tried because of the amount of time it can take to bring the case back to court, or simply because the prosecutor or judge who made the conviction has to save face.

The reason his kids were all encouraged to move away was because the chances were that at some point they’d get stopped by the police, just because of the colour of their skin and where they lived. So he sent them packing with their qualifications and his learning ethic. We reached the Interstate sooner than I expected and heaved our cases down onto the pavement. For a while we carried on the conversation in the sun by the side of the cab, then shook hands and went our separate ways. I watched him strike up a conversation with another driver through the terminal window while Natasha checked the time of the bus to Dallas.