SIXTONOON
From the air, an hour before dawn on Wednesday, July 23, the city looks like jeweled cobwebs on black velvet with its necklaces of lights stretching to the horizon. Hush before tumuli: Dallas finally catnaps before the beginning of the 204th day in its 140th year brings its crowded continuum of movement, noise, crowds, flashing lights, swarm of transport. The city is an endless, fantastic content without a plot, all natural and expected in America’s seventh largest metropolitan area.
Downtown. the city’s heart and money pump, quietly awaits the 115,000 workers who will soon fill its streets and offices, its 29,907 parking spaces and 2,507 parking meters. The skyline is no longer bland-box, nor does it look as if it were rented from Kansas City for the day. It is individualistic, correctly relied ing the different elements of a large city-different races, religions. societies, different family nexuses. Beyond, miles and miles of the same infinitely extended small-town look: low, bricky, sprouting elms and mowed lawns, reaching toward the future downtowns at Las Colinas and the Galleria. This is home to the 941,700 Dallasites whose feelings about their city run the whole gamut of emotions from fear, hate, lust, love. despair, hope, and disillusionment to disinterested affection.
Nothing has evoked more cant, jargon, gibberish, and sociological psycho-babble than past attempts to define “city.” Writer Calvin Trillin’s attempt makes as much sense as any: “No city council member comes to a meeting in a white cardigan; there are two places to buy pastrami; people eat supper after dark and call it dinner.” Through the ages, however, one characteristic never has been questioned. The city has always been an encyclopedia of potential, a place where anything is possible, a nightmare or paradise. It is a place of choice and chance. The freedom in a large city is enormous. In Dallas you can choose and invent your own society. The possibilities of personal change are endless and open.
Wednesday, July 23, 1986. In the history of Dallas, the day was both extraordinary and, beneath the surface spectacle, business as usual. President Reagan came to town and raised over a million dollars during lunch for Dallasite Bill Clements, running for governor. State officials finally approved plans to widen Central Expressway, (hat continuing thorn in the city’s side. The city council ended a 110-year tradition and voted to merge the park police with city police to patrol the 53,000 acres of parkland. And in London, another union. Mrs. Jean Popnoe of Dallas waited almost four hours in Parliament Square, a block from Westminster Abbey, to watch the arrival at 6:30 a.m. (Dallas time) of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, while Sean Wood, eighteen, a sophomore at Texas Wesleyan College this fall, fled the crowds for a tour of Windsor Castle.
If any large city has a common theme, it is as a compressor of experience. So many people and so many messages: news, meetings, possession, rejection, traces of intimate and stranger’s journeys, with the city renewing itself every moment as a snake casts its skin.
On this hazy, cloudless Texas day, the sun rose at 6:40, exactly six hours to the minute after eighteen-year-old Dianit-ta Stevens gave birth to the city’s newest citizen in Parkland Hospital’s labor and delivery room. Husband, Dale Ray Stevens, and Dr. Kenneth Goldaber both were present when a healthy Dale Ray Stevens Jr. (seven pounds, blue eyes, medium brown hair) announced his arrival at 12:40 with a rambunctious yell. He was the first of 110 babies born on July 23. The first death came soon after.
If 100 years ago the hard facts about large cities were the facts of appalling poverty, today the overwhelming fact of life in Dallas is the violence brewing on the streets. A story on the front page of this day’s Dallas Morning News Metro section announced that the city’s crime rate had jumped by another 20 percent for the third consecutive month. Thirty minutes after Dale Ray Stevens Jr. began life, an off-duty policeman’s bullet ended that of Rickey Darnell Carter, twenty-two, outside the Idle Rich Bar on Canton Street at 1:10. Carter had pointed his pistol at officer Eugene Stansell, demanding his wallet. Wednesday was this cop’s lucky day; the weapon misfired. Earlier, however. Rickey Carter’s pistol had worked perfectly when he had shot Joe Juarez, fourteen, in the chest and stolen his portable radio. Juarez survived, but Carter became the first of twenty-five Dallasites to die on July 23. Three of the deceased would receive pauper’s burials at Lincoln Cemetery in southeast Dallas.
An apartment on Sherwood Forest Drive burst into flames at 1:17, the first of seven structure fires during the next twenty-four hours that resulted in an estimated dollar loss of $67,940. Firefighting equipment “assigned movements” throughout Dallas included seven auto fires, six brush and grass fires, and seven dumpster fires. There were 203 ambulance dispatches but no calls for the twenty-five hydraulic jaws-of-life machines to free drivers from crumpled cars.
Thirty minutes before dawn, the more than 70,000 street lights automatically shut off as thousands of citizens hurried down the city’s 3,310 miles of streets and onto freeways. It seemed like all Dallas’s 1,656,161 vehicles filled Central Expressway (actually 148,000 daily a mile north of Woodall Rodgers) while the beginning flood of the day’s 89,934 cars using the Dallas North Tollway created a similar barely moving parking lot to the west. Somewhere in the day’s traffic are 6,000 nurses, 3,600 doctors, and over 7000 lawyers.
By 7:10, Tom Easterling, assistant executive director of the downtown YMCA. already is at work, watching some of the more than 1,000 of the YMCA’s 6,800 members who today will use the $7 million facility to run, push up, sit up, cycle, leg lift, and “stretchercise” to keep fit. Two hours later Mayflower moving van men also grunt and sweat as they haul Linda and Roger Gilliam’s plaid couch into a $472-a-month apartment in DeSoto. Linda, twenty-nine, has been transferred from Gibraltar Savings in Houston to work in the Oak Cliff office of First Texas Savings. Last year, 53,947 people moved to Dallas-more than 150 a day-and found the median price of a home $94,750. Renters pay a median rent of $500 per month for a two-bedroom apartment.
At the Highland Park Cafeteria on Knox Street, George Green and Ruthie Davis bake seventy-five pies in thirty different varieties, including Wednesday’s specials (Dutch apple and cherry and coconut) by ten o’clock. In dark, empty Reunion Arena this morning, operations manager Carl Haney makes sure the Maverick’s hardwood basketball court has been disassembled into four-foot-square sections for the National Basketball Association’s safety inspection later today. At 10:50, KRLD radio commentator Alex Burton sits in his office editing an interview with Dan Garner of the Arthur Young Company on an upcoming venture capital conference. Downtown at the Federal Reserve Bank, three money-eating machines process 1,070,000 separate bills, shredding 355,300 of them into confetti-sized squares. Only two bills are deemed counterfeit; another 714,700 bills are returned to circulation.
In the Wynnewood Village Shopping Center at 11:30, U.S.Army Recruiter Staff Sergeant Brian Henley enlists LisaAlexander and her friend. Shelly Homer. two recent L.G.Pinkston High School graduates, for a three-year hitch. Bothwill train in accounting and word processing. Channel 8reporter Nann Goplerud stands with her cameramen justbefore noon outside the Apparel Mart, awaiting PresidentReagan’s motorcade and talking with demonstrator-activistAnne McKinney, who “fully expects to be arrested.” Meanwhile, downtown in the Records Building, the steady streamof couples applying for marriage licenses, seventy-eight thisday, continues. During the day, the divorce capital of the country records another sixty-four petitions to sever that whichGod and the state had joined. -Richard West
6:00
Because the latest ratings are in and KVIL is still the leader of the local pack, Ron Chapman admits to a headache. His producer was made so sick by winning the ratings that she had to go home ill. Six, seven, eight or so others are absent too. Seems there was this little party, see, and it went on kind of late and got a little boozy.
But headaches, hangovers, and the tact that the sun’s not even up when he goes on at 5:30 a.m. cannot stop Chapman, can’t keep the sun from shining in his voice on the morning show at:
KAAY (loud, leaning back from the microphone, finger pointed heavenward)
VEEEE (enunciated as though he had just collaborated with God to invent the letter V)
EYE? (phrased almost as if a question-and then, leaning way up close to the microphone, making love to it:)
ELLLLLLL.
A poetic interpretation of ran- dom letters assigned by the Federal Communications Com-’ mission. People hearing this cheerful, avuncular DJ bubbling happy-talk into their cars probably picture him seated comfort- ably behind a little desk with a microphone in front of him, relaxing as he chit-chats with several thousand friends stuck in traffic from 5:30 to 9.
But Chapman is seldom seated at his command post/crow’s nest in the Capital Bank Building overlooking Central. Between , songs, he’s rustling up tapes out of the collection or hollering , down the hall for someone to come in and pretend to make idle over-coffee gossip with him. He makes it sound as though he’s just sitting there reading the newspaper, and, oh, hey, what’s this ? Wait ’ll you hear this ’n. But the tips and quips were marked long before the show began.
6:30
Shed number three at the Farmer’s Market-true farmers only, no wholesale dealers-already is full of sellers bringing produce out of pickup trucks,converted school buses, vans, bread trucks, and campers. Squash? “Not the big ones. Use , them for relish. Get them small yeller ones for your vegetable,” say the Chamberses from Ben Wheeler. Peaches? “If you can’t smell of it. it ain’t ripe,” say the Hunters from Jacksonville.
Mrs. E.R. Bomer sells peas grown on her 250 acres between Palestine and Athens. Purple Hull, Lady Cream. Red Zippers, Zipper Creams, $1.25 a pint, five pints for $5. She leaves her farm at 2:30 and is set up in downtown Dallas by 5. For twenty-six years, Mrs. Bomer has been making the two-hour trip every day of the week from early April until the first frost, usually late October. She also sells okra, potatoes, beans, and onions. By midafter-noon she is sold out and heads home with her helper, Steve Craft. Watermelon? “Naw, none this year. First too much rain, then too dry. That’s fanning,” grins Mrs. Bomer.
7:01
Morning traffic is relatively light, so KRLD traffic reporter Ron Bahr and helicopter pilot C.B. Gillingham venture away from the freeways to investigate a fire at the QuikWay convenience store at Lovers Lane and Greenville. A KRLD news reporter arrives on the scene and radios Bahr that glass is broken out in front of the store. It looks like a possible firebombing.
But traffic duty beckons as KEGL’s traffic copter pilot notifies Bahr of an accident on southbound Central on the Lem-mon Avenue bridge. Heading for Central and Lemmon, Bahr spots a motorcyclist who has been struck by a car lying motionless on the pavement.
After completing a clockwise circuit of Dallas freeways, Gill-ingham alerts D/FW Regional Tower that they will be passing through their airspace, headed for Fort Worth. Bahr-a former air traffic controller until the 1981 PATCO strike forced him to seek new employment-explains that it’s much easier to move around over Fort Worth because copter pilots there only have to communicate with Meacham Field. In Dallas, they have to deal with D/FW, Love Field, Ad-dison, Red Bird, and Dallas Naval Air Station.
On the way back to Dallas, somewhere over the Mid-Cities, Bahr and Gillingharn spot WBAP’s chopper in a field. Apparently their traffic reporter, Dick Siegel, has paused to relieve himself before continuing the morning’s rounds.
7:35
Since it’s Wednesday, Teresa Mueller hurries through her short walk to the bus stop on the corner of Purdue and Boedeker, on the easternmost fringes of University Park. “Half the people on this route miss the bus on Wednesdays,” confides the pretty young bank officer, white linen suit jacket draped over one arm. “This driver drives the route about five minutes ahead of the others. But people don’t seem to have figured that out.”
Teresa settles into a clean, sticky, blue vinyl seat next to a window and reaches into her canvas “Le Bag.” She begins purposefully weaving thin mustard-colored yarn into the needlepoint outline of a mallard duck. Other regulars on the Boedeker line scan The Wall Street Journal, flip memo pages retrieved from bulky box-like briefcases, or simply stare vacantly into the sluggish traffic that defines Central Expressway from just after 6 a.m. until sometime in mid-morning. “When I’m not doing needlepoint, I study German on my Sony Walkman,” Teresa says just as the DART driver detours Live Oak to pick up Elm on the other side of Good-Latimer Expressway. (“He thinks that’s the route,” she sighs, eyes rolling roofward.)
8:00
Jerrett Sullivan, age two, nestles his head on his mother’s shoulder as she hurries him into his classroom at The L & N School. Jerrett is crying, clinging to his mother and his soccer ball, unsure about school today.
Holly Sullivan, working mother, might be late if she worked for any other company. But Lomas & Nettleton is one of a handful of Dallas businesses that provides on-site child care for its employees. Holly only needs to deposit her child, walk up three flights of stairs, and begin her workday as a trainer in the tax department. But today, there’s a problem with Jerrett. When Holly tries to leave him in the loving arms of his teacher, Jerrett begins to cry, but Holly forces herself to leave, caught in a tug between heart- strings and purse strings. Later, at break time, she checks on Jerrett and sees him sitting in a circle, smiling and singing: “I like to eat bananas, pears, and grapes-because my name is Tarzan of the Apes.” Holly returns to work feeling better.
8:02
Someone yells “atmosphere,” and thirty extras move, in a straight line like schoolchildren, onto the set of “Dallas.” The set is actually just the pavement in front of the Campbell Centre, where three short scenes are to be shot. The sun beats down on the forty or more crew members milling about gulping pop like water-it’s only 8:00 but the temperature is already a sweltering 85 degrees, made worse by the glare from the golden building. A makeup man readjusts the tissue around actor Dack (Jack Ewing) Rambo’s neck, to keep makeup from melting onto his shirt. Jennilee Harrison (Jamie Ewing Barnes) and Sherril Rettino (Jackie Dugan) practice their lines as they stride in step through the plate-glass doors of the “Barnes-Wentworth Building.”
“No Talking! Be quiet!” shouts the second assistant director. The clapboard man claps. “Roll!” There is suddenly utter silence, which continues until, ten seconds later, someone lets out a groan. “STOP, STOP!” screams the assistant director. Rettino’s earring has fallen off.
8:15
“The first thing we do is feed the pets,” says Gilbert Colwell of Hackberry Creek Ranch in Las Colinas. He dumps some food in a dented stainless-steel pan for Tilly the cat. The barn smells mildly of horse manure and hay. Gilbert steps up close where his Skoal-stained teeth and big nose with its web of tiny red blood vessels are visible, “That there’s Rene,” he says, nodding at a handsome, dark-skinned young man. “He’s a quiet boy.” He looks away, out into the morning sunlight, then back with squinting eyes, “He’s from pargway.”
Later, by the hay shed, Gilbert carries a seventy-five-pound bale of wire-bound alfalfa hay with his bare hands to a group of horses waiting at the fence. He breaks it apart into flat squares and throws it to them.
Inside the barn after feeding the pasture horses, Gilbert slips a worn rope halter on a horse in a stall. “This feller’s old,” he says. “He stepped on something out in the pasture a few weeks ago. It went in deep.” He walks slowly on his old bowlegs, | leading the badly limping horse out to a patch of green grass , beside the barn.
9:01
Staff horticulturist Bill Reager has been working in his fourteenacre garden for almost four hours. The hum of one lone lawn mower and the strong smell of freshly sprinkled fertilizer serve as a backdrop to Reager, whose careful eye scans the wilting dahlias propped up in the Evaluation Garden at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens.
“Dahlias grow like crazy in the cool northern climates, but they don’t do a thing here,” says Reager. “Hopefully, I’ll find a way to make these dahlias delight in the pounding Texas sun.”
941
Bill and Lola Walker of Los Angeles seem duly impressed. He’s a policeman; she’s a family therapist, and with (heir son Michael and eleven other tourists on this Grayline Tour bus, they’re listening to Ben Kiker, “a dyed-in-the-wool Texan,” drawl out a well-polished spiel about Dallas. The Walkers have found Dallas to be a friendly, hospitable place. Lola is struck by the difference between Dallas kids and their L. A. counterparts, who are “often very pampered and expressive.”
As the tourists clamber out of the bus to see Reunion Tower, a man with a deep Southern accent tells the group how to separate Yankees from damn Yankees. (“The damn Yankees are the ones that stayed.”) On the way to the Kennedy assassination site, Kiker reminds his charges that while Dallas is not the largest U.S. city, it is very definitely the largest landlocked city. Kiker tells the story of JFK’s last day | and how “the shots rang out,” a phrase he uses three times. After (he shooting, the visitors learn, Oswald boarded a bus to Oak Cliff “at this very bus stop.”
9:45
In this “renter’s market environment.” three representatives of Cushman & Wakefield of Texas meet with Doug Tibbetts and three of his associates from Equitable Real Estate to evaluate plans for the development of an office building on Cedar Springs, WSI Project 8601E, a proposed building with 165,000 square feet and 494 parking places.
The negotiations are extremely friendly, though both parties know exactly what they want and what they are prepared to give. The Tibbetts/Equitable team knows precisely what it takes to make this $11.4 million project profitable, and the financial realities and limitations dictate their negotiation strategy. Cushman & Wakefield, representing a client whose identity they will not re-veal, works on rates and negotiates amenities.
This first formal meeting of the parties ends inconclusively; in ten days, Cushman & Wakefield will reconvene with Equitable and other developers to complete their project analysis for the client.
10:00
Women from all over the country converge on the Dallas Convention Center entrance, some pausing amid a flock of vendors to buy a pink rose and a special Mary Kay seminar issue of the Morning News before stepping past security, out of the already-hot morning sunshine and into the lobby. Just inside, a pink Cadillac revolves slowly on a turntable, In halls leading to the auditorium, recruits ogle the furs, jewelry, and other gifts for the ambitious elite who sell enough Mary Kay cosmetics.
Greeting and hugging one another, groups of heavily made-up sales directors-their uniform blue suits bedecked with ribbons, sashes, jewelry, and medals-resemble generals or diplomats. They advance, a dozen or so at a time, through a passage and onto a stage that could be the set of a TV quiz show. There, before an applauding army of nearly 5,000 Mary Kay employees, they smile, wave, and stride down steps lit with rows of flashing bulbs, to sit among the troops. Singers and dancers take the stage briefly for a Vegas-style routine. Then Mary Kay Ash comes to the podium.
She sports a lavender suit and a white fox fur piece. Striking blonde hair frames her beauty-queen face. Her “girls” sit enthralled in the convention center auditorium, having come here for the twelfth time in as many years to draw inspiration from their leader’s annual speech, which somehow ties together religion, patriotism, and cosmetics. Aroused again, they’ll soon disperse throughout the country, determined to sell even more cosmetics for Mary Kay.
10:12
As the bell rings, Jennie Fuller begins to call roll. Twenty-eight of the twenty-nine students in Sunset High School’s sophomore English summer school class are here.. .Victor, Xavier, Carme-linda. Shaw Spivey, seventeen, gets to work copying down today’s paragraph from the blackboard. He’s a likable-looking kid in a T-shirt that reads “Some guys have all the luck.” His name is neatly written on the corner of his desk, upside down and sideways. Ms. Fuller is discussing capitalization rules. She asks for some examples of proper nouns.
“A place?”
“Russia.”
“A person?”
“Tom.”
“A thing?”
“The Washington Monument.”
Ms. Fuller looks pleased. Shaw is still writing furiously, long after the other students have finished, in a backward slant. He’s determined to be a junior in the fall.
10:20
At the Columbia Packing Company Inc.. on East 11th. the only abattoir in North Texas, the last of the 102 hogs to be slaugh-tered this day await their fate in pens behind the building. After weighing, they’re drawn up to the top of the ramp where an electric shock renders them unconscious. A worker shackles one hind leg, the animal is hoisted upside down, and a conveyor belt moves him inside.
The throat is cut. Pig blood fills half a vat, to be saved and sold, mainly to Asians, for $5 a gallon bucket. Then the late porker slides into a vat of scalding-hot water and moving wooden paddles that loosen body hair. Back on the overhead hoist, men in white coats spattered with blood scrape and burn off the remaining hair until the carcass attains a glabrous smoothness. Then comes the beheading, cutting open the front and back of the carcass, sorting the viscera-nothing is wasted-and inspection, washing, and freezing. The end result is distributed widely in Dallas. Tom Thumb stores and local independent groceries purchase 250,000 pounds of these porcine products weekly.
10:34
’Thank God it didn’t rain!” exclaims the mother of the birthday boy, as she trudges cheerfully across a gravel play yard (toting a new Styrofoam cooler full of vanilla Blue Bell (“Believe me, it was on sale!”). It’s a big day for the Lintons-Blake, the elder of the two boys, is five years old, and his family is out in full force to celebrate at the tunneled and (turreted wooden playground at Prestonwood Elementary School. Dad, with video camera poised on a tripod at the edge of a shaky blue tent, a shield against the mounting morning heat, stands proud but humble beside his creation-a muddy green cake shaped in (he likeness of a five-year-old boy’s superhero, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Dinosaurs appear on the paper plates, in the plastic favor bags, and on several of the brightly wrapped packages that are beginning to pile up beside one of the tent’s metal support poles.
For a while, Blake and his friends are content to dart happily in and out of the playground’s many child-sized nooks and crannies. Then one by one, they drift to the tented picnic table. Happy Birthday dear Bla-ake, Happy Birthday to you!
10:45
“You don’t want to sit at that desk,” says a student at the Dallas Institute of Funeral Service. “It’s the kiss of death.” Ken Whittaker, dean of the institute, says the student is nicknamed the Las Vegas Flash. The Flash leafs through his notebook, a gray anatomy of skull, skull, skull, face muscles, and a list of facial lines, natural and acquired. “The acquired ones,” he says, “come after the divorce and your daughter’s marriage to the town drunk.”
Today’s lecture on facial reconstruction, “making Momma look like Momma,” as Whittaker phrases it, ranges from the science of forensic anthropology (facial flesh is eight times thicker over the cheek than over the bridge of the nose) to canons of proportion (the distance from hairline to brow equals that from base of chin to base of nose).
“This is the last time the family will see the person,” says Whit-taker. “You are giving them their last memory of the deceased.”
11:05
At the Dallas Animal Control Shelter, dispatcher Dale Harris has just directed field officers to Watauga Road, where a woman has trapped a raccoon, and to Northaven Road, where a woman has logged a noise complaint against her neighbor’s rooster.
At the front desk, a man surrenders his dog, Lady, claiming his wife can no longer stand the pet. “It chews the furniture,” he says to Officer Ron Jacobs. Another man comes in to retrieve his dog, Puppy, who’s been quarantined for the past ten days after biting someone. Rabies investigator Terry Snyder says Puppy, a Spitz, isn’t rabid.
This facility, one of two shelters the city operates, will impound as many as 4,500 animals, mostly dogs and cats, during a summer month. A few of the animals that have not been abused, misused, and victimized by fate will be put up for adoption for a small fee. A few will be reclaimed by their owners. The others, the vast majority, will be humanely destroyed by chemical injection and buried in a landfill in South Dallas.
11:45
The only artwork on the wall of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, is a photograph. In the picture, hundreds of penguins are huddled on an icy ledge, diving one by one into a frozen lake.
There are 10,000 bankruptcy cases pending in this office. Today you might say nine new penguins jumped in. One of them took the plunge in the hearing room of trustee Rob Yaquin-to, on the ninth floor of the Federal Building, where Larry (not his real name) and his attorney Fred Gross sit.
Rob Yaquinto is an attorney, one of many appointed by the U.S. District Court to handle bankruptcy cases. As a “trustee,” he is responsible for finding out if the person filing for bankruptcy has any assets that can be sold for cash to pay off creditors. In a friendly, conversalional tone, Yaquinto goes through the details of the forms Larry and his wife Arlene have already filled out with the help of their lawyer. They own no property, no stocks or bonds. The men discuss the value of the couple’s two cars, a 1976 Ford LTD and a 1979 Ford Mustang. The couple owes the IRS $1,299. but even bankruptcy . cannot absolve them from federal tax debts.
“Where is your wife?” Yaquinto asks Larry. Since the bankruptcy has been filed jointly, both partners are required to appear at the hearing.
“She’s at home in bed.” he says. “She has lung cancer.” The illness was discovered in December 1985. Her treatment has run up some medical bills, but most were covered by Larry’s insurance when he was working. He is now out of work.
They have some cash in the bank, a loan from relatives. “You understand,1’ Yaquinto recites the rules from memory, “that if you or your wife become entitled to an inheritance within 180 days, it becomes part of the estate.” Larry nods. Yaquinto schedules Larry’s discharge hearing for a day in late October. On that day, (he couple’s unsecured debts at the original time of filing-credit card bills, personal loans, utility bills-will be erased. The bankruptcy will be official.
“She might not be alive by then.” Larry says softly.
NOON TO FIVE
We map the city by private benchmarks that are meaningful only to us. We build a grid of reference points, each enshrining a personal meaning, each with clear boundaries, rituals, and customs. Among those benchmarks are the city’s more than 1 .000 restaurants, which offer a flabbergastric array of cuisine choices. The office is only a digestive stroll away for downtown workers who mob the streets for their favorite eatery or brown-bag it by Thanksgiving Square. The homeless and their fellow urban isolates form a line around the First Presbyterian Church’s Stewpot for a free lunch of stew, bread, and milk. At some of the city’s private clubs, the affluent hobnob with one another before the wine and roast beef. The 2,873 inmates in the four county)- jails this Wednesday are served a pork chopette (ground pork molded into chop shape-no bones allowed; they easily become knives). steamed cabbage, candied yams. applesauce. cornbread, and a juice drink. Other food items not permitted in jail for various reasons: butter, raisins, thick gravy. black pepper. The city with its work, deals, trials, construction, sex. and crime takes an intermission for the ritual we call lunch, whether it be a sandwich or a gargantuan banquet.
At 12:25 in Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse, the city’s premier barbecue gorging site since 1958. the ham already is sold out as customers listen for names and initials amidst the whacking knives and ringing telephones. This day like all days. Sonny Bryan will close by early afternoon, when he has sold all his 800 pounds of beef, 150 pounds of ribs, 25 pounds of ham, and mountains of cole slaw, beans, onions, and potatoes. Across town at the Wendy’s on Live Oak. The Reverend Bill Bryan, pastor of the Grace United Methodist Church (one of the city’s 1,097 churches) and son of Sonny, had a hamburger and baked potato with a member of his congregation.
By 12:30. Charlotte Taft, the controversial director of the Routh Street Women’s Clinic. had finished her take-out sweet and sour soup from a nearby Chinese restaurant and had opened her mail. This day the mailman brings nothing suspicious-looking, so she doesn’t have to call the police department’s bomb squad. Around the corner, one of the city’s virtuoso chefs. Stephan Pyles. had lunch at Pepe’s Cafe next door to his Routh Street Cafe and by 1:05 was scanning a supplier’s list for future dinner selections.
Meet, eat, belch, resolve, adjourn, back to work. Eight miles outside of Santa Fe, Stanley Marcus had finished his chicken salad and jello at 1:34 and was silting before his typewriter working on a new book. The Information Retrieval Specialists at the downtown public library continue to field the twenty-plus calls an hour from their lobby telephone bank, commanded by trim, pleasant-faced Marsha Lockwood. How many calories in a kiwi fruit? Thirty. The most used reference tool: a file marked simply “Weather Disasters and Bad News.” By day’s end. 11,843 people have checked out 14,114 books from the estimated 4,386,139 volumes housed in eighteen branch libraries.
Patroling the city, officers write some of the day’s 743 parking tickets, 1,325 traffic tickets and other municipal violations; and serve, clear, or detain suspects on 164 warrants. At 2:01. Sheriff Don Bowles reads a report on future Dallas jail population projection. Later he calls a specialist in New York about a computerized fingerprint system for the city.
Southland Corporation President and CEO Jere Thompson and the Reverend W.A. Criswell both attend the Reagan-Clements luncheon. Later, Criswell has a 3:30 memorial service at his First Baptist Church. By 2:40, U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders has concluded naturalization proceedings in a private court session in which a young deaf Filipino boy was adopted by his American parents. At the same moment in the Fairmont Hotel, singer Maria Muldaur and her four-piece band were winding up rehearsals for her dinner show in the Venetian Room; Dallas Morning News president and editor Burl Osborne prepares a speech on his word processor for an upcoming convention in Vancouver; at the Dallas Times Herald, executive editor Larry Tarleton pores over budget figures before his 4:30 meeting with editorial department heads to plan Thursday’s front page.
By 5 p.m., the Texas Rangers have lost to the New York Yankees, 3-2. and are flying back to Dallas to open a six-game home stand. They trail the first-place California Angels by three-and-a-half games.
Like a thick belt of insulation, privilege and comfort surround the autonomous Park Cities in the center of Dallas andits shopping oasis, the Highland Park Village. Inside thepolished chrome and glass doors of Mirabelle Caterers, headchef Joe Durante sifts toasted coconut into a cold soup ofcoconut juice, lime, and Myers’s Rum and stacks twelve cansof artichoke hearts in preparation for a cold supper feast forthirty-two guests at the Lakewood home of fashion designerFinley Moll. At exactly five o’clock, the city reaches its peakdemand for electricity, 15,305,000 kilowatts, a record high forthe year. During the day, the city will use 289,754,000kilowatts. By the end of the working day, ten bankruptcieshave been filed. At Southfork Ranch, Dallas’s number onetourist attraction, 969 “Dallas” fans paid $5 each to tour J.R.’sspread, including twenty-five minutes in the Ewing house.Downstairs only, please. -R.W.
12:00
On a blindingly sunny day like this one, it is best to follow the advice of nightfighters like soldiers and cops. Before you enter the Palms Danceland, close your eyes and count to ten. Once through the door, it’s darker than a poor man’s hopes. Then you can see the grandmotherly ticket-taker (S3 cover), the Bad News Band playing country cowplop tunes, and eighty others dancing, drinking long necks, acting out Friday night at a Wednesday noon. For these people, it is Friday night.
Why does Pamela, real estate saleswoman, come here? Very deliberately she answers, “So I can cope with my life.” She knows the paint contractors, pest controllers, insurance salesmen, real estaters like herself, other women married to older men in a long marriage with two teenagers. Like the working class it serves, the Palms is open nine-to-five Monday through Friday. Thursday is the busiest day, and Pamela’s favorite. “I met the guy who exterminated my house bugs and a pool man,” says Pamela. “I just come for a few hours, socialize, and go home. Nice men, all of them.”
12:25
The adults at the back of the crowd hardly notice Bill Clem- ents; they can”t even see Presi- dent Reagan. Elsewhere in the auditorium, Reagan supporters outshout apartheid protesters; some of the faithful grab the demonstrators’ signs. But in the back, they’re watching Sam Donaldson and the rest of the national press assembled to cover Reagan’s visit to Dallas to campaign for Clements. “Quit giving the president such a hard time,” one over-enthusiastic Texan yells , to Donaldson.
“Just as soon as George Will stops praising him,” Donaldsoncalls back to the hecklers.
But up front on stage with the honorees, far away from the politics, the protesters, and the press, twelve-year-old Jenny and ’ eight-year-old Jamey Appleton are silently going over the words to “America the Beautiful.” They have been practicing almost non- ’ stop for three days, along with the rest of the St. Michael and All Angels youth choir, to sing to the president. The children are awed when the president walks by them to the podium. They stand quietly during the long speeches. Then their moment comes. The song is finished in three minutes, and they are rewarded with red, white, and blue pandemonium, a showering of balloons and confetti.
12:30
“Most people have thought about getting a tattoo,” says Patrick of Patrick’s Tattoos, “they just don’t admit it much.”
Patrick, who runs one of the city’s two licensed tattoo parlors, is a bearded fellow in his early thirties, with tattoos covering his upper torso. He has been a tat-tooist for over twelve years and got his first tattoo when he was fifteen years old. Patrick has put a tattoo “on every part of the human body except the teeth; there ain’t too many places you can’t do a tattoo. I’ve even done the inside of lips.” Seventy percent of Patrick’s clients are males, with the majority of those receiving tattoos on some part of their arms Female customers “generally get theirs in more discreet areas.” Patrick says.
A male customer thinks it over for a while and selects a ladybug. Patrick traces the image and applies it to a stencil, which he places just below the man’s knee. Patrick then shaves the area before switching on his electric tattoo machine. The machine sounds like a high-speed vibrator; it pierces the skin at a rale of 4,500 penetrations per minute. The customer feels little pain; twenty minutes later, the tattoo is finished. A ladybug is born.
1:19
The lobby is quiet, almost funereal. The ticker tape machine shows each trade on Wall Street as soon as it’s recorded, but only three men are watching it-two on the sofas and one outside in the hall eating a Popsicle. The rest of the regulars are milling around in (he back of the room. These men spend most of their days at the Charles Schwab discount brokerage office in the Plaza of the Americas- sometimes playing checkers, sometimes making transactions, sometimes just sitting, like today, watching their money. They’re retired or laid off or between jobs or wealthy enough not to have to work. Their only purpose is to monitor the market. Finally an old man breaks the silence.
“I don’t imagine you care how the Yanks and Rangers are doing?” Someone cares just enough to encourage him, so he continues. “Well, my bus driver-he’s pretty knowledgeable about baseball-says the Yanks are about to hit the top and slay there ” He goes back to marking prices in his notepad, and the place is silent once again.
1:33
When Michael Ballard was discharged from the Navy in 1982 he thought he was through with boats. He certainly never thought he’d be a taxi driver.
Four years later, the tanned and affable Ballard put on his dress whites and went to work as a driver of one of the five water taxis at Las Colinas. Actually Ballard is boat operator of Las Colinas Water Transportation Services, one of the twelve drivers who pilot these gorgeous Italian-made mahogany boats nearly fifty hours per week per vessel.
More than 55.000 people work in 13 million square feet of office buildings in Las Colinas, and 2,500 of them use the water taxi service each week, gliding down the long, beautiful canals that stretch between the skyscrapers.
Jose works as a hair dresser at Studio 4001 in Las Colinas’s Williams Square. Two or three times a day he needs to run an errand, get lunch or supplies. He always takes one of the water taxis.
Paying a dollar for a round trip, Jose relaxes. He has yet to see a car, truck, or pedestrian.
1:39
Coiffed and manicured ladies stroll in and out of the cosmetic counters just inside the main entrance. It’s “Last Call,” Neiman-Marcus’s celebrated seasonal sale, and shoppers of all descriptions hunker over tables laden with spring and summer apparel that has been slashed down to (almost) affordable prices. Ladies wearing various degrees of makeup are having their faces done by pink-smocked women with not a hair or eyelash out of place. Beth Goode, a young nurse, is perched on a stool, accepting the makeup ministrations of Scott Hagler, the rep of Pre-scriptives, a skin-care line exclusive to N-M. Hagler. one of the store’s three male makeup personnel, is a self-described “top gun” in the skincare business. He cleanses Goode’s face and offers pearls of cosmetic wisdom such as “You don’t have to fry your face to get rid of oily skin.” Four different foundations are tried on Goode’s face with the end of a Q-tip. The last shade blends with her skin tone.
3:00
At The Dallas Morning News, fifteen or so editors and copy chiefs gather to decide which stories will run on the front page of tomorrow’s edition. All hope to convince managing editor Bill Evans that their stories have news value that “will hold up all night,1’ says John Cranfill, an assistant managing editor. Typically, the three o’clock meetings produce few of those explosive exchanges that were standard fare on “Lou Grant.” On slow days the editors may wrangle to slide some of their features into the vacuum, but not today. Obviously Reagan will claim part of page one, though a report from the closed-door luncheon says that his remarks, like his earlier speech at the Apparel Mart, “were pretty bland.” By phone hookup, Janet Battaille in the Washington bureau adds an ironic twist: while Reagan praised his “good ally” U.S. Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, Barton and twelve other GOP House members were slamming Reagan’s “lack of policy” on the state’s energy problems. Other editors weigh in: state budget woes mount; House Speaker Gib Lewis got 98 percent of his contributions last year from special-interest PACs; the shooting of Rickey Carter by an off-duty policeman looks justified, according to witnesses. Other stories are still developing. The divers scouting the Titanic may come up with new pictures: the planned protest against Reagan. set for 4:30, could yield something; Terry Maxon has hopped a plane to Austin, where the Texas Highways and Transportation Commission may approve the long-awaited plan to remodel Central Expressway. A few editors toss long shots into the hopper–the Cowboys in Thousand Oaks, local reaction to the royal wedding-but Evans settles on the Reagan visit, George Shultz’s testimony on South African sanctions. Hobby’s tax plans, the merger of the park and city police, and Central, if the decision comes down.
3:01
At Michael Wilson’s photography studio, behind the bulk mail center on I-30, model Bren-da Aaronson arrives wearing base makeup. She’s just done a beauty shot (face only) on another job and her hair is still straight. Behind her is a young designer carrying the five samples of her holiday evening-wear that will be shot today. Michael Wilson moves around his studio, adjusting props and talking to himself about the right lighting. This is a “freebie.” Aaronson says, meaning that everybody gets something out of the project but no money changes hands. The designer gets black and white shots for a promotional packet that she hopes will attract her first customers and the attention of the press; the model and photographer get good shots for their portfolios. Wilson changes the lighting several times, moving his lamps an inch this way, then that way. The canvas backdrop is moved into place. Wilson tries a white stool, then a black one. The lamps are moved a smidgen closer. The white stool comes back. Aaronson emerges in a form-fitting black velvet cocktail dress with a peplum that gives an hourglass effect. This shot should look nostalgic, reminiscent of Forties Hollywood. The designer looks apprehensively at Aaronson’s retreating figure. “This moment,” she says, “is the culmination of three years of thoughts and sketches.” The white stool is tossed out. The dress is pinned even tighter. Aaronson looks like a young , Lauren Bacall. The designer smiles and nods. The camera begins to click.
3:36
The big talk at Monday’s Child revolves around summer camp. The front of the clever children’s store is jammed with sun visors and satchels, each emblazoned with names of the camps most popular wilh Park Cities parents: Waldemar. Kanakomo. Long-horn. A mother and daughter with matching red hair and skinny legs drive up in a shining green Lincoln Town Car for a last-minute sweep before starting the long drive to the Hill Country. They pass the sale table piled with sweatsuits in eight different shades of lavender (S8 per piece) and beeline for the slippers. They pick out a turquoise-and-pink pair with two big toes on each foot. like cloven hooves. The mother interrogates the dark-haired young salesgirl: “Are vou sure she doesn’t need one of those canteens with a knife and fork attached to it? Someone said her daughter got in trouble for not having one.” The clerk suggests The Container Store.
Behind the camp stuff, a blonde woman in long red shorts and white maternity midriff browses among exquisite $300 lace christening gowns. Other ladies riffle through handmade $500 Laura Towery party dresses. The kids flock to the little tables scattered around the store’s perimeter, pawing through the “fun junk”: Bazooka bubble gum in squeezable toothpaste tubes ($1.20); “crazy goo” in little eggs; rabbit hangers and rabbit chairs; hair ribbons painted with Armstrong Elementary colors; switchblade combs; stuffable bear-shaped overnight bags; sleeping bags in the form of giant footballs. “We’ve got other sleeping bags that look like ballet slippers, and a real popular one that’s a big green bug with yellow arms. But we’re all out,” the salesgirl sighs. “Camp, you know?”
3:55
“It’s the power, the power that’s most important,” says Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, his voice swelling with evangelical emotion, then falling into a serious whisper. Price isn’t talking about | Black Power or the power of God or the power of politics. He is talking about the power under the hood. The horsepower.
Price has just rolled onto the lot of the Road Show on Lemmon Avenue in a cherry red Ferrari on loan to him from the dealership. Everybody in the place, and of course owner Bob Gunter, comes out to greet Price, a regular customer who’s currently between cars. Price brought his black Mercedes 500 SEC in a few months back for an oil change but never picked it up. Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz happened to be driving through town, saw the car on the lot, and had to have it. Then Price got a red Mercedes 450 SL from the Road Show but sold it early in July to a man from Midland. Again, the price was right. Today, he is in to check on another Mercedes, this one a blue-green 500 SEC that is being customized for him. He’s anxious to get it. “The Ferrari is just no comparison,” Price says.
4:30
It’s late afternoon-slack time in D/FW’s flight control tower-and the six air traffic controllers are getting punchy, bantering back and forth among themselves like boys in the back row of a church camp chapel. The CONRAC radar screens show inbound American Airlines Flight 268 approaching Terminal 3E at 13,000 feel and 170 knots. As the plane draws within five miles of D/FW, the local controller takes operations over from his peers in the “dark hole” (the basement housing the base of operations, responsible for controlling aircraft within a forty-five-mile radius). Holding his telex to his ear, the controller delivers rapid-fire instructions to the aircraft’s pilot in an incomprehensible technical lingo. The plane lands and is handed off to the ground man, who helps the pilot taxi the big bird to a park position in a display of consummate teamwork. Then, without a missed beat, the joking resumes. …
FIVETOEIGHT
Arnong the day’s big news stories offered to the 390,275 subscribers of The Dallas Morning News and the 244,629 readers who take the Dallas Times Herald. is a report that Dallas area unemployment had reached 7 percent, the highest since 1980. with an estimated 97,600 folks out of work. The average number of citizens receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits today ($2.76 per child) was 24,952. The general economic slowdown around the country was beginning to affect Boomtown, U.S.A. In the five years ending last March, only Washington, D.C., had created more jobs than Dallas (306.100 vs. 284,100). On July 23. the city ranked just behind the nation’s capital and ahead of third-place Los Angeles in office-space absorption and construction. Its average rental rate of $19.82 per square foot hovered below the nationwide figure of $22.71.
The 1.295.100 in the area who held jobs mixed freely with the out-of-work in the lemming-like rush to the suburbs after five o’clock, an estimated 194,000 of them riding the city’s 1,000 buses. Some workers had the day off. The 328 garbage collectors tomorrow would man 164 trucks and deliver the usual 2,000 tons of city garbage, rubble, and brush to the central landfill at 5100 Youngblood. And some work never stopped. Aircraft steadily filled the skies, with 111.786 people “emplaning” today.
Animal control officers impounded ninety-one dogs, forty-six cats, and five raccoons. The new animals, would be held seventy-two hours, then euthanized. All five raccoons were sick and got the needle containing sodium pentobarbital. Wednesday evening’s cuisine for those humans incarcerated in Lew Sterrett: beef burritos with cheese sauce. Spanish rice, seasoned pinto beans, spinach with hard-boiled eggs, carrot cake, and iced tea.
As dependable as daylight, thousands of Dallasites stopped at their favorite bar after work for a happy-hour drink amidst decor that ranged from Augustan Rome to Sinatra Shag to Barnyard Baroque. To live in a city is to live in a community of strangers, and a place to rub shoulders with others in the early evening helps us know the people who, seen from a distance, remain strangers. New camaraderies: adults resembling Magritte’s expressionless businessmen become animated, real, alive at bars like Brio, which led the city in taxes on liquor sales in May, at $65,100. Others briefly stopped at one of the city’s 731 liquor stores.
Pat Langdon at the Dallas Council on Alcoholism received her usual fourteen to twenty calls today inquiring about treatment. Almost all of the 250 detoxification beds were taken for the area’s 10,000 to 20,000 low-income alcoholics. At Help is Possible, the city’s only nonprofit drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, director Bob Scott reported thirty-five inpatients, seventeen outpatients, and fifty-eight referrals.
By the end of this average retail sales day, shoppers and spenders in the Dallas-Fort Worth area had spent over $2 billion; S224 million in department stores alone. Dallas County auto dealers sold 643 new cars and trucks (273 domestic, 240 imported) and four motor homes. In Preston Royal Village. Barbara Unger sold about 300 books at her House of Books, average for a hot July day, while at the Dallas Museum of Art, 292 visitors sought culture of another kind.
But man does not live by art alone. The city’s thirty-six Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets served 14.500 customers 9.000chickens (22,500 pounds or 11 1/4 tons), which were breaded with 3,750 pounds of flour, also used to make 26,000biscuits. The Colonel’s cooking was washed down with 694gallons of soft drinks. -R.W
5:10
Sandy Kress remembers 1980 and 1984, the nightmare years when the local Democratic party was swept from domination to destruction in landslide losses to a Republican Party headed by Ronald Reagan. As county Democratic Party chairman, he’d rather remember 1982, when Texas Democrats won all the major statewide offices because Reagan wasn’t on the ticket and, more importantly, because the usually quarrelsome Democrats united in a massive gel-out-the-vote campaign run by Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby. With no Reagan to fear this time, Kress is starling early. Today, he meets with a room full of Democratic candidates and their henchpersons at a downtown law firm. He’s got a message that starts as a suggestion and ends as a blunt warning: as another politician once put it. a house divided against itself cannot stand. Kress wants precinct walkers and door-hangers and 30.000 to 40,000 tabloids pressing what he calls “the quiet issue” of the’86 campaign, “the quality of our candidates versus theirs.”
“Are we going to do it?” he asks. “The decision rests in your hands.’’ It’s clear that it also rests in their wallets. Kress wants big contributions for the war chest from Congressmen Martin Frost and John Bryant, a hefty donation from Cathy Cain, the party’s nominee lor county commissioner, and smaller amounts from other candidates. Kress believes that a well-financed, united front will add about 10 percent to his candidates’ vote totals. Most seem to agree. County Commissioner Chris Semos pledges his money and his time, as does Judge Ron Chapman.
At a quarter till seven, Kress rushes across town to the KERA studios, where he’ll field questions on Karen Denard’s 7 p.m. Evening Talk Show. By 7:05. he’s locked in verbal combat with a feisty caller who can’t believe the Democrats have ruined the country with Keynesian economics. Kress takes a deep breath and plunges in.
5:33
Western Airlines Flight 46 taxies slowly to a stop in front of D/FW’s Gate 11 but Le Van Viet remains expressionless, quietly holding his six-month-old daughter. He has not seen his closest cousin Tra Van Truoc in more than five years, and now, after spending a hellish year in a refugee camp in Galang, Indonesia, Truoc is finally coming home. Home will be Euless, Texas, where the twenty-six-year-old refugee will learn English and sharpen his carpentry skills and build a new life for himself in the States. Viet’s two-year-old son, his eyes wide with excitement, shifts impatiently from foot to foot.
Suddenly, Viet grabs his wife’s hand. White teeth flashing in a broad grin, Truoc walks through the entrance into Terminal 2E and sweeps the toddler up into his arms. Suddenly shy, the baby buries her face in her father’s neck. Viet slowly lets out his breath, relieved, and meets his cousin’s eyes, Truoc is home.
5:47
The cool pink-and-gray tiered, | granite exterior of Tiffany & Co. lends an austere stateliness to the south end of the Galleria. Tiffany’s facade. like the store’s reputation, is rather more forbidding than enticing, so it takes a dose of courage for Jim, a twenty-one-year-old Delta baggage handler, to enter the store with his buddy Chuck, twenty, night manager of a Fort Worth Tom Thumb. They gape at the $25,000 watches. “I’d never pay that, even if it is from France,” Chuck says, shivering in a white “Spring Break ’86” T-shirt. “Hell, this Swatch only cost me thirty bucks, and it came all the way from Switzerland!” Nearby, serious buyers-all women-roll their eyes and go back to studying the fancy goods: cuff links called “monkey fists.” $1,550 a pair (“should be worn with a clean shirt,” manager John Uzzo says primly); strings of coral and turquoise beads ranging from $20,000 to $40,000; a fantastic ruby-and-diamond encrusted necklace at $53,950 (thai doesn’t include sales tax. but Tiffany’s will throw in the gift-wrapping for free).
At 5:45 precisely, customers ’ are politely shooed out of the store. Sighs one ousted shopper, “Just think of all the money my husband just saved” The clerks then spring into action, wheeling out drab green kitchen pastry carts and loading them with trays full of what Uzzo calls “the major pieces, the real gems.” Expert hands flick silently in and out of the cases, grabbing hunks of beads and gold and Paloma Picasso jewelry. By 5:52, Tiffany’s is silent as a library, the only noise a clicking and jingling of keys as cases are unlocked and relocked. The staff then wheels the carts from the denuded cases into the walk-in vault in back. There, trays of the most valuable pieces are loaded into the inner sanctum: the vault inside the vault. The ritual is done. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly says, “Nothing bad could ever happen at Tiffany’s.” But just in case, Tiffany’s takes no chances.
5:51
At Love Field, the pilot of an Air Continental Lear jet steps down from the plane as a blue Security Couriers van backs up to the plane’s doorway. Inside the van is approximately $100 million worth of checks from Dallas area banks bound for banks all over the country. MBank has just loaded a $20 million shipment on board. Unlike the luxury one would expect, the interior of this Lear is barer than the men’s room at a Stuckey’s. A guard crouches at the front of the plane, , dutifully watching over the Hefty garbage bags stuffed with checks. 6:O2
The “fantasy therapeutic session” is winding up at the Letot Center, a Dallas County Juvenile Department emergency shelter for runaways. Most of the center’s twenty-three residents this evening are now headed for the cafeteria for a meal of submarine sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. But twelve-year-old C.J. (not his real name), the youngest boy here tonight, sits on a couch in the corridor, still upset that his mother, who visited him earlier in the day, would not take him home. “I’m not going back.” he tells a stranger. “It’s not going to work out.”
After dinner on Wednesdays, the boys and girls go their separate ways for an hour: the boys lift weights as Q-102’s rock music blasts from a radio; the girls lip-sync to music from soul station K-104 before entering into a frank discussion with “Momma” (a counselor) about menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, and the state’s sodomy law. As eight o’clock draws near, the guys beg a counselor for one more game of dodge ball, as someone in the living room turns the TV set to Channel 8. C.J. is glad dodge ball tired him out, because maybe he can go to sleep when the lights are turned off at ten. He’s used to staying up until 2 or 3 a.m.
6:14
By 6:15, the intersection of Walnut Hill and Central Expressway in North Dallas is packed with cars. Most of the drivers in their air conditioned cars don’t see thirty-seven-year-old Barbara Bandy, who stands just east of the expressway, holding a dozen roses at her side. Her job selling flowers begins each day at two in the afternoon, when a driver from the flower company lets her off at the corner. He returns to pick her up around nine that night. She has four dozen roses to sell ($5 a dozen), three dozen carnations ($3 a dozen), and three dozen mixed (half carnations and half roses that sell for $4 a dozen). She makes a quarter for every dollar’s worth of flowers she sells. If she sells her entire bucket, she’ll make just $12 for the seven-hour day.
Today, she has sold nothing. The flowers are still fresh, but her body is so wilted by the sun that she has trouble lifting her arm to beckon at cars. Barbara wears leather tennis shoes; the laces are missing. Her yellow blouse clashes hideously with , her black and white striped dress. But she got the clothes free at the downtown shelter for the homeless, sponsored by the Dal- las Life Foundation, where she lives. The money she makes from selling flowers allows her to buy some makeup and extra soap that she can’t get at the shelter.
6:30
The phone rings in a renovated Victorian home on Swiss Avenue. Volunteer Mike Hanson ’ (not his real name) quickly picks up the receiver, hoping the caller won’t hang up. “Suicide and Crisis Center,” he says. There’s a long pause, then the caller speaks, rambling incessantly. Mike listens, picking the right moment to talk. ’’Sounds like you’re really upset today.” Mike’s voice is smooth and empathetic. “So you got fired just today- that’s rough.” He grabs a pen and paper. “Do you mind telling me your name?… I know how upset you are, Doris. Are you thinking about suicide now?. . .” Mike wrinkles his brow. “. . .So you’re saying the only way you’ve got left is to kill yourself. . .. Doris, ’ have you ever attempted suicide before?” Mike plays with a piece of Scotch tape, twisting it between his fingers repeatedly, “… I can really understand why , you’re upset right now.. .You’ve got three kids, you lost your job-you’re broke. . .Doris, do you have any other family in Dallas?… Yes, I can understand you’re feeling abandoned.. . . What about your ex-husband.. . Does he pay child support?” Mike shakes his head no. “Maybe you should contact the district attorney’s office. . .Well, Doris, that would be up to the courts; 1 suppose he could go to jail… Let me get the number for the ’ district attorney. Hold on a second.” Mike tucks the receiver under his chin, riffling through a large Rolodex. “Here it is.” He replaces the phone to his ear. “Doris. . . Ah shit, Doris.” Mike rolls his eyes, leaning back in his chair. “She hung up.”
7:O2
A departing Santa Fe freight train rattles the windows at Coombs Bridge Studios, a former warehouse and meat-processing plant at 2401 S. Ervay. Inside her first-floor apartment/ studio, sculptor Joy Foe has a pot of black-eyed peas on the stove and a sketch for a new work on the drawing board. Two flights up, Jennifer Griffin is getting into her costume for her nightly appearance in “The Rocky Horror Show” at the New Arts Theatre. All over Coombs Bridge, painters and potters and photographers settle back to enjoy dinner and watch the sun set over one of the most spectacular views of Dallas’s skyline.
Until recently, artists looking for this kind of lifestyle had to move to New York’s SoHo or East Boston. Now they can find it here and there in a few Dallas lofts and warehouses. But sometimes it’s a strange life. “The one thing I really miss,” says Eileen Sky, a ceramic artist who once lived in a New York loft, “is being able to walk downstairs and buy something-like a cup of coffee.”
7:15
At the Cistercian Abbey near Las Colinas, Father Abbot Nagy leads the way down a narrow hallway to a corner office, turning on the light and gesturing to a chair. On his desk are two yellowed copies of The Texas Catholic, which offer extensive background on the Abbey and the Fathers. A picture of this same office and this same man graces the center section of one of the papers, dated early 1964. Everything looks virtually the same. The typewriter, the adding machine, the stacks of papers all sit where they did twenty-two years ago. Father Nagy himself has barely aged. But in a monastic order that was founded in 1098 and has survived Turkish occupation and now total suppression in their Hungarian homeland, change comes slowly.
“When I was in Hungary I lived and studied in Budapest as did the other Fathers,” says Father Nagy. “We are used to living in the fast-paced cultural centers. You find this across Europe. The Cistercian Congregations are in Paris and Rome and other cities. It is important to live in the community, just as it is important to withdraw.”
7:27
It’s opening night at Deno’s on
Greenville and the help outnumbers the customers as fourteen employees huddle behind the new counter like a load of boat people, watching the door as if it were the promised land. The sidewalk traffic is heavy; people look through the windows at the new player on the block.
Owner Dennis Nance and a couple of investors have gambled a bundle in the unpredictable Dallas restaurant crap shoot. “We figured with all the trick food joints on lower Greenville it was a good place for a killer hamburger and some old-time foods, like steak fingers and milkshakes,” Nance says. “No la-te-da stuff. This is food I ate when I was a kid growing up in Oak Cliff.”
A couple comes through the door and the staff comes awake. The people are squinting at the menu board. Nance heads toward them: “Damn! I need to get a light for that board. Hi folks! What can I do for you?”
7:36
Felini, just back from a day doing hair and makeup for a shoot for Mary Kay Cosmetics, is ready to start his day at L’En-tourage on Knox Street. Born Philip Thomas, he’s only twenty-five but he’s been cutting hair for thirteen years. He started in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas. “While the other boys were mowing the lawn,” he says, “I was cutting the neighbors’ hair. It kept me out of the heat.” Felini has a steady client list. Although demand for his services has gone up since signing with Page Parkes Model’s Rep. he doesn’t want to lose the salon end of the business. He works most nights until eight or nine. Tonight’s first customer. Brad, is telling Felini what he wants. Felini talks as he works, describing the Dallas hair and makeup scene but never missing an important clip here or there. Within twenty minutes, he’s done; Brad’s tossing his new mane and smiling. At 7:56 p.m., the next appointment slips into the vacant chair.
7:40
Steve is telling his story of drinking his way out of a job, marriage, and worldly possessions. After his fall, he landed on The 24-Hour Club’s doorstep with seventeen cents in his pocket. The meeting room seats fifty and is already half full. Guest speaker at eight. AA streetwise philosophy on the wall: One day at a time. Easy does it. Think, think, THINK,
The 24-Hour Club is a house halfway between drunken poverty and sober recovery. The dress code is simple: keep your shoes on your feet and your feet off the furniture. The policy is straightforward: come home drunk, you pack your bags. And in the parking lot are nicely polished recent models as well as $30-a-week junkers. The doctors and lawyers come here, says director Bill Lovelady, “to learn humility.”
7:50
With its colorful felt banners proclaiming, “Prepare, Wait, and Watch,” “Praising God Through Teaching His Word,” ’ and its worn brown cushions, St. Luke Community United Methodist Church in East Dallas feels cool, safe, and familiar. A sweet-sounding chorus of “Jesus Loves Me.” sung by about six pews full of mostly pigtailed, squirming children, ends the opening service of the church. The children shuffle out to finish crafts and drama projects while about sixty black adults gather for Bible study upstairs.
The lesson tonight is prayer, what it is {maybe just “Lord, have mercy”), when it’s done, and why. Voncile Hill, an attorney studying at Perkins Seminary at SMU, is armed with a well-organized pack of scripture references but opens with her most convincing endorsement: a soft and gracious prayer for a family faced with the death of a loved one. Quietly she asks for strength that surrounds and upholds, for forgiveness for things done and undone. Her lesson closes with a promise for those willing to commit at least five minutes a day to prayer. She speaks, positively shining. “I can testify. It will make a difference.”
EIGHT TO MIDNIGHT
On Wednesday. July 23. the sun officially set at 8:37. The low temperature recorded was 75. the high. 97. Dallas required 451,968,000 gallons of water, far above the average daily amount of 307 million gallons. City plants treated 197.7 million gallons of waste water. Programmed by computer to change with sunset, the 260 one hundred-watt bulbs on the Reunion Tower’s 118-foot geodesic dome switched from a message of welcome to a pulsating light show that would continue hourly until 2:10.
With work finished for all but the most driven, the city’s hedonistic pulse beats louder. Theaters, strip joints, music-halls, comedy nightclubs, and homosexual discotheques provide a continual swirl of pleasure and set the stage for some kind of connection, a central obsession of big-city life. In the week’s Dallas Observer, 72 personal ads from women and 115 from men advertised their loneliness. After linking, two of these strangers this night could have seen “Showboat” at the Fair Park Music Hall or ’The Mark of the Vampire” at the Granada or listened to Kenny and the Kasuals at Doc’s Country Club, or Romeo and the Dreamers and About Nine Times at Taheeti’s.
Just after sundown at White Rock Lake, Jason O’Neil, a fourth-grader at John Han-by Elementary School, watches a small perch jump about ten feet from where he’d last cast his hook. By 9 p.m., all ten batting cages at the Twin Rivers Sports & Amusement Center are full of swingers paying a quarter for eight pitches. Sweating, uniformed, intent-looking weekend warriors hammer baseballs alongside scrubbed-faced pre-teens while nearby. Bobby Schrader. the quarterback on this season’s Piano Senior High School football team, and girlfriend Monica Fox relax after daytime jobs and analyze angles at one of three miniature golf courses.
Just before midnight, Jan Korkames, owner of Limos By Jan. one of me city’s more than one hundred limo companies, asks her driver, tuxedoed Maria Pennamen. to take the long, white 1985 Cadillac past the Mansion and then down McKinney. Jan will be twenty-eight years old in a few minutes, and she turns up the Blaupunkt stereo, opens the moon roof, and announces: “I’m going to meet my boyfriend at Brio at twelve midnight and he’s taking me to Neiman-Marcus tomorrow to get me a dress.” -RW.
8:05
Tom, a Dallas bookie, is hold-, ing court in the Junkyard, an earthy northeast Dallas bar. Over a Dewar’s and soda, he’s discussing the meaning of life with Wayne, who runs a Dallas blackjack game, and Lawrence, who got out of prison a year ago but doesn’t cash his paychecks because a female friend is providing him with the necessities of life.
Tom is temporarily out ofwork and says he’s living off oflast fall’s football earnings. (Atleast that’s his story, and he’ssticking to it.) Most Dallas bookies are out of work during thesummer, Tom says, becausebooking baseball isn’t a profitable enterprise.
A one-time MENSA candidate, Tom has dabbled in a few serious professions like real estate and insurance. He’s even worked a short stint in a city government job. He jokes about how he’ll be remembered when he’s gone.
“When 1 die, I want my epitaph to read: ’On a scale of one to ten, his life was a one-and-a-half. That’s not bad, though, ’cause he never met anybody higher than a two.’”
8:28
Nick is behind the wheel of a car that might be a Hollywood pimp’s but was actually confiscated from drug dealers. His informant, a tall, lanky black woman in her early thirties, has gone into a nearby apartment complex to make a buy for him. He is parked up the street, out of sight but still close enough to do something about it if all hell breaks loose.
Normally, nothing much happens on a buy. It’s when the officers come back with warrants, shotguns, .45s, and the battering ram called the Key to the City that World War III breaks out. On a bust earlier this year Nick was leading a team in and got shot in the funny bone. He didn’t laugh. The joint survived in relatively good repair, but the bullet severed his ulna nerve; for the rest of his life he’ll go around feeling like he just banged his elbow hard on the edge of a table. He counts himself lucky.
This particular informant knows the ropes, so Nick is not particularly worried. She returns without incident, carrying $20 worth of cocaine cached in a gelatin capsule.
The informants make between $30 and $100, depending on the amount of drugs confiscated in subsequent arrests.
Nick will later make a buy himself, to check out the layout of the apartments, and in a week or so will obtain a warrant and bring the Key to the City. First, though, he and his sergeant, Don Woods, are going to take some time off to ride wild bulls and unbroken broncs in a Canadian rodeo. To relax.
9:05
There’s this guy, clad only in his socks and underwear, lying on an air mattress in the middle of the floor. There’s another guy down on his hands and knees next to him. The second guy is about to take off his pants and do things to the guy on the air mattress when this brunette woman comes running in and the second guy, scared, runs off. The brunette, who talks with a French accent, starts taking off her clothes, and the guy on the air mattress sits up, a little amazed, but not as amazed as patrons of the Prophet Bar who are just now walking in the door.
She is telling the guy on the mattress that her husband makes her read porno, and she is simultaneously starting to remove her camisole when he screams and runs from the room. Then this tall blonde woman comes in with a riding crop and starts swatting at the brunette, and the blonde’s husband comes in and takes off his pants, refers to everyone in sight as swine, pigs, dogs, etc, and then passes out on the floor, and then his blonde wife takes off all her clothes except for a Merry Widow thingie, a garter belt, and some black lace hose.
A little later, the phone rings. It’s some guy named Dale calling from a bowling alley, where he’s “disciplining” a young man who wants German lessons and who has a sensitive sister who writes poetry, which seems to be exactly what all five of the other people are looking for, so they all leave for the bowling alley.
It turns out that this is a play called “Noon” by Terrance Mc-Nally performed by a splinter group from the Greenville Avenue Pocket Theater. There had been no promotion, no sign at the door-nothing, in other words, to warn patrons (of whom there are precious few) of what to expect.
9:15
In the parkland Hospital emergency room, the sounds from two television sets on different channels clash in the air. A cleaning woman in a light peach uniform tries to mop, but no one moves their feet and she stands looking at the dirt on the floor she can’t reach.
A black woman, thin and gaunt, sits with a month-old baby lying still in her lap. Her purse is on the floor, with the baby’s bottle visible inside. A fly circles the baby’s head as the woman stares into space. The fly grows bold and walks on the baby’s face, then lands on the woman’s smooth, waxy black arm. Then it drops to the nipple of the bottle in the woman’s purse, where it walks spastically until it finds the opening at the tip of the nipple.
9:23
It’s a slow night at the Million Dollar Saloon, a classy Greenville Avenue topless nightclub. Morgan, a thin, buxom blonde, is on the front stage, clad only in a G-string and dancing to “Tuff Enuff.” Steve Haas, twenty-three, is perched high above the crowd in the DJ booth. Beneath him is a goldfish bowl of gawking humanity: four stages, four near-naked women dancing, and men shelling out $2.75 for a beer and stuffing G-strings full of dollar bills.
“These are beautiful girls,” says Haas, seated in what he calls “mission control.” He announces the girls, selects the music they dance to, and operates the heat-sensitive light panel.
His voice booms over the mu- sic. “This is Michael Lee,” he says, bringing on a perky, full- bosomed brunette whose eyes flash at the men. “Come on, the more noise you guys make, the more fun we’re going to have.”
“This club caters mostly to the businessman, not the kids,” he tells a visitor. “Actually this is not a bad job. although it’s not something I want to do all my life. I always have to tell my friends this place isn’t sleazy like some of the topless clubs. This is the kinda job you can get trapped into, because the money’s so good. I’ve met more millionaires in here than any other place in the world I’ve worked.”
9:34
Wednesdays at the famous Starck Club are for a few regulars who just want to dance or shock an occasional tourist. Three valet parking attendants work in steady rhythms as two club-goers head for the giant Buck Rogers doors while primping their spiked hair. Dale Smith, head valet and managing director of PCA Valet. Inc.. is talking about his work: ’”I asked the Lord, how could 1 work for a place where people drink, practice ways that offend my beliefs, and dress scantily? He told me that I would be the closest they might come to Christ.”
The PCA valets, many of whom belong to a religious organization in Oak Cliff, park about 900 cars a night on the weekends, so they have little time to minister. “If a person is depressed, suicidal, or too wiped out, the Lord will tell us to talk to them. But.” Smith says, “I don’t push it and neither do my people.” The odd hours required for valet parking (8:30 p.m.-4:30 a.m.) allow some of them time to perform various religious requirements. “It doesn’t hurt to know that you have an honest man parking a $60,000 automobile,” Smith says. Smith’s major problems occur when eager party people fail to mention faulty brakes or transmissions. “I wish folks would understand that we’re there to see they have a good time.”
9:53
The most international chunk of Dallas sits along a stretch of Maple Avenue between Throck-morton and Amelia Street. Along here is an assembly of Rastafarians, Ethiopians. Sudanese, and Southeast Asians, But after dark, these people must prefer to entertain in their homes, because the Latins are the only visible signs of humanity on the streets.
Most of them are moving to or from one of the many cantinas in the area, where they dance the night away to the sensuous rhythms of sirens and pulsating beat of shattering glass. On weekend nights the dance halls really hop, so the uniformed rent-a-cop in front of the Las Vegas Ballroom seems relieved that it is a Wednesday. Inside, only one couple is slow dancing beneath the ubiquitous revolving sequinedball. Peppy Latin music blares over the sound system, but the regulars at the bar ignore the tunes and stare into their beer glasses. “Come back Friday when they have a live band,” says Louise, a patron. “That’s when it really gets fun in here.” Out on the sidewalk, the security guard looks like he can hardly wait.
10:00
It’s a “slow night” at the Federal Express office at Love Field, but ten people have come in during the past five minutes. The four employees move quickly and look as though they could send off eight dozen packages in five minutes blindfolded. A curly-headed man in a Strictly Tabu T-shirt bursts in and announces to the whole room, “I drove 900 miles an hour to get here, people.” This office stays open until 10 p. m -the last place in Dallas proper for next-day Federal Express service. At ten, when the door closes, Lew Cal-ver slips in. He’s sending an illustration to Discover magazine and says he comes here about fifteen times a month-always just in time, he says; the clerks say he’s always late, like tonight.
10:40
The lines are forming outside Baby’s, the high-tech nightclub at Lemmon and McKinney that caters primarily to gay men. This is the busiest evening of the week, according to general manager Bart Gober. It’s “modern music” night, the cover charge is only two bucks, and well drinks are only fifty cents. Already the parking lot nearly a block from Baby’s is filling up.
The walls and ceilings of Baby’s are black. A sunken dance floor is lined with pink neon lighting tubes enclosed in glass tile. Sophisticated track lighting hovers overhead, sprinkling an assortment of colors onto the dance floor. Men dance with men. Women dance with women. Men dance with women. Men dance alone in the aisles. Men hug each other.
11:00
It’s getting late at Super Bingo on Ross Avenue. “Last $200 game,” call out the men with the bingo cards. They walk between the long tables, shelling out cards and picking up bills. A dollar for a sheet of three. One black couple gets $10 worth. A card man tosses two sheets in front of an old woman with gray hair. She unfolds two wrinkled bills and lays them at the end of the table.
The caller calls the number, then places it in front of a camera that shows it on TVs around the hall. Except for the caller the room is quiet.
“Bingo,” someone says. The crowd groans, and the card men hit the aisles again.
11:13
At Mistral in the Anatole Hotel, the “new music” crowd begins pouring in. The patrons are mostly in their early twenties, with aloof expressions and severe dress that make them look ten years older. They all have embraced the lyrics and lifestyle of a group of post-punk rock bands with names like the Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen. Each song is accom-panied by a music video shown on a huge screen looming over the dance floor. Everyone dances, and it really doesn’t mat-ter whether you have a partner. “The music is everything to me,” says twenty-year-old Kath-leen Danford, who’s wearing the standard all-black garb withblack, metal-clasped shoes and a Madonna-style cross around her neck. Her father is a Dallas police officer. “It’s all I care for. The music isn’t disco or country, it doesn’t spend all its time talking about cheating or drinking loo much. It’s (thinking music. It’s intellectual.”
Her friend Karin Bagwell, nineteen, whose life was forever changed when she heard the music of the Sex Pistols and Siousie And The Banshees, twirls the one earring she is wearing and stares out at the new generation that has caused so much consternation. “Just tonight,” says Karin, “my mother says something about me spiking my hair. My God, it’s been five years since I’ve spiked my hair. Do you think I’ll ever be accepted for what I am?”
11:22
Nothing happens on this stretch of Harry Hines unless you prompt it, so we decide to pose as a couple and see if we can “make a date” (set someone up for an arrest). Bill, a vice officer, motions to two women, one black and one white, crossing the street in front of our car. “Excuse me,” he says, “I hope you don’t think this is too kinky or anything. ..” He asks them if one would like to get in the car and fool around with him while I watch. “Oh honey, that happens all the time,” the black girl tells Bill. “I ran into the same kind of thing in Tucson!” She is grinning broadly. I’m sure she weighs more than 200 pounds, and I wonder how she’s going to fit into the car with us. The other girl chimes in, leaning into the car on the driver’s side. She looks very young-pretty even, caked with bright pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow. She suggests they both work on Bill, “so you can have two styles,” she tells me. “Can you spend $40 and another $10 for a room?”
Bill balks at (he asking price, says he only wanted to spend $30, but under the circumstances, we agree to meet them in five minutes down the street at the La Casita Motel. As the girls saunter down the block, the black one turns and wags a finger at us. “You better not be cops!” she laughs.
Sgt. Williams is covering us, only a couple of blocks away, with two other plainclothes officers. They make the arrests at the motel. We see the women again at headquarters, where they are photographed and escorted into a tiny room to await a transfer to jail. Handcuffed together, they are in surprisingly good spirits. “Did we miss dinner?” the hefty one asks jokingly. “You ain’t missed many,” is the reply from one of the cops.
MIDNIGHT TO S I X
Except on the freeways and down entertain-ment strips, the humans most in evidence after midnight are policemen, what the French call “Les Seigneurs de la Nuit the Night Lords. Pride, gluttony, anger, sloth, luxury, avarice, and lust-they deal with all seven deadly sins and much more. Like the medical technicians at Parkland Hospital’s emergency room. they process the city’s pain. No one knows more about how the city can put a weird hackspin on you, how angels turn to rogues, how (the dream can go rancid on the pedestal. Before July 23 ended. the Night Lords recorded “index offenses” : 1 murder, 2 rapes-16 robberies, 18 aggravated assaults. 121 burglaries, 280 thefts, and 51 auto thefts.
Once again, downtown Dallas is silent as the grave. A laundry bundle in a doorway turns out to be the remains of an elderly man, one of the more unfortunate of the estimated 75,000 people over the, age of seventy-five in Dallas. The luckier among them live with families or sleep in the city’s seventy-two nursing homes. One of the Yellow Cab Company’s 505 taxis cruises down Main Street, responding to one of the average 150 calls an hour the company receives. Yellow Cab is one of eleven Dallas cab companies with a total fleet of 1.537 taxis.
There is no single point of view from which one can grasp the city as a whole. That, indeed, is the central distinction between the city and small town, where sameness causes people to suspect anything different. It is a world of fragments, isolated signals, disconnected gestures, cries and whispers that often resist all attempts to unravel their meaning. A place of multiple viewpoints, with no clear rules* about how one is supposed to manage one’s body, dress, talk, or opinions. The only continuity often is a discontinuity of styles, of appearances, and appearances ore easy to conic by and very bard to lest for authenticity.
The greatest cities in history, from Plato’s Republic to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, have tried to arrange society for man’s greatest good. Always it was a dream pursued and always it failed. But if Dallas is often vain and destructive, it also holds most of what makes human life endurable, enjoyable, and at times, transcendent , We should not be, surprised, for there is nothing in ourselves that we cannot detect in the cities we have made. -R.W.
12:01
John Hamilton, a private investigator for Popp & Associates in Irving, is parked outside an airline terminal at Love Field. He lights up a cigarette, takes a puff, and blows smoke out the window. His eyes remain focused on a terminal entrance. “I like the chase,” he says. “1 like to track people down.”
On this hot, humid night, Hamilton is waiting for a Dallas executive to arrive on a late flight from Houston. He has a picture of the man and an idea where the executive will be going when he gets into his car parked nearby; he’ll rendezvous with his girlfriend who works in a bar in Irving,
If things go as planned, Hamilton will follow the man to the meeting. He’ll see all he can, then make a report for an attorney representing the man’s wife. The divorced couple is headed for a mean child custody fight. Hamilton’s report should help (the woman gel what she wants.
12:31
The MPact machine at the Old Town Tom Thumb is probably the hottest cash lode in town because of its proximity to some of the city’s best-attended meat-markets. Date-bait clothing-shirts with sailboats and thin gray or white pants-look fanny in the greenish glare of the supermarket lights.
Most everybody making a withdrawal this time of night is preparing, they hope, for sexual transactions. Most of them are men-Phillip, for example. “MPact machines are the best invention since natural gas,” he says. He’s pulling out $60 to finance an expedition into the Acapulco Bar, having shot his first wad at Brio without having impressed anyone in a big way. Behind him is Douglas, who had rather optimistically entered Brio to buy the ladies some drinks-with only $20. “1 thought I could get off light,” he explains. He’s now back to pull out another $60 from the machine. “I like to drink and I like to dance. What can I say?”
Another big spender is a nineteen-year-old-girl named Lynn, who hangs out at La Bare three nights a week. She has a particular interest in Ace, a male stripper a( her hangout, and she’s been shuttling back and forth between the Tom Thumb and La Bare to tuck bucks into Ace’s G -string. She pauses to tally how much she’s dropped down Ace’s shorts this evening. “Let’s see. 1 got out $80. . .and another $80. . .and now I’m getting $160 out of the machine. That’s $320, isn’t it?”
12:52
’This is it. That’s our car.”
Willie Johnson, fifty-seven, is backing up his blue 1982 Ford pickup, matching the back bumper of the truck to the back bumper of a 1981 Oldsmobile in the parking lot of the Pepper Mill Apartments in far North Dallas. He then grabs the electronic winch control and jacks the Oldsmobile up. For about fifteen or twenty seconds (here is a grinding sound that brings a man to peer through his curtains in a nearby apartment unit. Willie drives away with his prize, never getting out of his truck, never even touching the car he is towing. Two blocks away he makes a brief stop at a telephone outside a convenience store to call the police department. That way, they’ll have a record that the car hasn’t been stolen.
As a repo man for Doug Jameson Auto Recovery, Willie has a , license to steal -sort of. He works mostly at night when peo- , ple are fast asleep. On the average, he says, he repossesses be- tween fifteen and twenty cars a week. “This is just a job,” he says. “It’s nothing to brag about.”
So far. this has been a good night, although the first search ofthe evening, for a 1985 ChryslerFifth Avenue in The Village, wasfruitless. ’
“You don’t take chances, because you don’t want to have to hassle with people,” says Willie. “You got to be calm, because you only get one chance in this business. You don’t worry about personal problems. You just get the , car and get out. If you get caught you have to explain. If not, , you’re gone.”
1:55
After a hot day, it’s even hotter inside Mrs. Baird’s bakery plant, where workers turn out up to 5,000 loaves of white bread an hour and the cloying smell of yeast is just shy of asphyxiating. Upstairs, flour dust in the air settles on every surface, giving the main baking area an almost ethereal quality. The conveyor belt that slowly draws the rising raw loaves into the 500-degree ovens is a football field in length plus ten yards. The bread is baked for nineteen minutes, cooled for an hour, then funneled downstairs to the bagging room to be wrapped and stacked in those familiar white trucks for the next morning’s deliveries. From dough to loaf the process takes exactly eight hours-a solid day’s work for which a Mrs. Baird’s employee is sufficiently compensated-but not in bread. “We have to pay wholesale for our bread,” says Robert Reynolds, bake shop foreman. “If we get caught stealing, we get docked.” ,
2:00
By 2 a.m. the night crowd is beginning to straggle through the doors at Lucas B&B Restaurant, the famous Oak Lawn institution. The food here is mediocre at best, but the human pageant is nothing short of wonderful, as the most varied crowd that one can imagine in Dallas comes together for eggs and bacon and oil-black coffee. On this evening, two stubble-faced cops, bored, hardly speaking, sit in one of the vinyl booths next to a group of obviously drunk gay men who talk about makeup. A little farther away two working-class men ease into another booth, making sure their middle-aged paunches don’t bump the table. Across the “aisle from the police officers sits a beautiful young actress, out ofwork, speaking earnestly to a man her age who isn’t payingmuch attention. His glance keeps sliding down the aisle at a coupleof females, one of whom looks suspiciously like a man dressedlike a woman.
“Oh honey,” says Alice Coch-ran, sixty-two, the waitress who presides over Dallas’s 2 a.m. creatures. “We have some beau- tiful men who come here dressed like women. You’d never know. They’re as beautiful as anything you’ll see.”
Alice occasionally admits she feels her age at this job. For five years she owned a restaurant in Pensacola, Florida, called, appropriately. Alice’s Restaurant. Then, eighteen years ago, her husband died, she moved to Dallas, and she has been waitressing ever since. It has taken its toll. By the end of the 10:45 p.m.-6:45 a.m. shift her ankles get tired, and Alice sits in the back to rest.
2:57
Frank Oakerson waxes philosophic about throwing The Dallas Morning News for a living and about hiring newspaper carriers while he stuffs, folds, and puts rubber bands around 120 morning papers: “People seem to have absolutely no compulsion to give any kind of notice before they quit this job.”
Oakerson, with four years of experience, is the contractor for the Oak Lawn and Turtle Creek area, which means that when he doesn’t have someone to throw a route, he throws it himself. This morning, he came prepared to throw one route, but somebody didn’t show. So, after he throws 120 papers, he will come back to the drop lot behind Whittle Music Co. on Oak Lawn to stuff, fold, and put rubber bands around 150 more papers, and start again. At least the second route is all residential, no apartments. He throws it in an hour.
3:10
The man is wearing a Galves-ton Beach T-shirt, new Reebok sneakers, a pair of handcuffs, and the forlorn expression of someone who would much rather be somewhere else. Outside, Dallas is dark and dormant. But inside the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, night-shift workers in Central Intake-popularly known as the book-in area-are getting geared up for the rush that ensues when the clubs close.
The prisoner is a twenty-two-year-old man arrested for driving while intoxicated. “He says he’s going to refuse,” a police officer tells the Intoxilyzer 4011AS-A operator who otherwise would have administered a breath test. “Good,” the Intoxilyzer operator says. “That’ll make it short and sweet.” The officers nudge the prisoner into a long, narrow room painted institutional yellow and close the door.
4:OO
The crowd at Don Carter’s All Star Lanes on Skillman thins out considerably at 4 a.m. Last call was two hours ago. The cocktail waitresses who bring drinks to the lanes have counted their tips and gone home and the late-night bowling revelers have moved their party elsewhere. In Lane 28, a girl in her mid-twenties adjusts her hand-brace and asks her boyfriend what’s wrong with her approach while two Korean teenagers complain in broken English to the desk attendant, who dispatches a lane assistant to fix their automatic score keeper.
The serious bowlers have come out-the guys who bring their own shoes and glare disdainfully at anyone who steps up to a lane anywhere near them while they’re concentrating on that 7-10 split. Two couples on a double date weave toward the foul line. Night manager Bo Hughey looks on amiably as he sprays disinfectant into recently returned shoes.
5:O5
The corridors on the ground floor are well-lit and immaculate but empty and oddly silent, bringing to mind a space vessel that computers continued to operate light-years after all the human beings have died. The space motif extends to the production area on the second floor, where workers wearing white smocks with hoods and masks perform mysterious tasks among a bewildering array of robots, microscopes, and computer displays.
About 100 people work the third shift-11 p.m. to 7 a.m.- manufacturing semiconductors at the Texas Instruments DMOS-IV facility. “I don’t have trouble going to sleep. I go to bed around 11, get up around 6,” line worker Paul Slay says. “I live my life like I would if I worked the first shift, only different hours.” At shortly after 5 a.m., his day is nearly over.
