China Grove

It's Saturday night and we're going to eat out while we still can, before the lockdown resumes, as it surely will.

'Let's go to China Grove,' I suggest.

We discovered the place just last week on the way to Victoria. We saw much Trump campaign material that day, big signs and flags secured to the gates of ranches as we headed for the coast. Keep America Great, they proposed. It was depressing, but seems significant that Trump's support is at its most visible way beyond the city limits, and that it's nearly always ranches - people with money rather than the trailer parks, contrary to some of the mythology.

China Grove has a few trailer parks, probably more than average, and has the reputation of being the place where all the crackers live. This makes it sort of exotic from where we're sat, so that's where we're going, knowing full well that we'll almost certainly end up listening to stadium country as we eat our barbecue. Without wishing to seem too anthropological, we just want to see what the place has to offer. Bess finds a list of the top ten places to eat in China Grove on her smartphone and we hit the road. Top of the list is something called the Den, with second, third, and fourth places all occupied by different outlets of Dee Willie's BBQ Smokehouse. The rest are mostly Mexican diners.

We follow directions for the Den, and end up exploring more of China Grove than we expected. We go through a neighbourhood which is clearly better off than where we live, so that's interesting, and the map is once again proven to be distinct from the territory. We drive on and realise that we're leaving China Grove. The Den is in fact in La Vernia, some seventeen miles east of China Grove. This seems to represent a derailment of our expedition, but never mind. It makes us feel a bit sorry for China Grove given that the best place to eat in China Grove isn't actually in China Grove.

La Vernia is outside the city. It's of a decent size but is spread out, as towns in Texas tend to be. It looks clean and modern and well maintained for the most part. The cremains of Bess's father were interred at a church here for reasons no-one quite remembers in the absence of any particularly obvious familial association with the town. As we approach, her phone goes - a text message from the city warning us to stay in our homes so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It feels a bit apocalyptic, but we're already here so we may as well eat.

We were doing so well. We had chalked up about sixty total deaths among the two million inhabitants of Bexar county, with fewer and fewer new cases coming in each day. Mayor Nirenberg was on top of it, but found himself overruled by Greg Abbott, the state governor, who seemed particularly bothered that anyone might have to pay a fine for exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, and seemed sympathetic to those who claimed that the way forward would be to pack as many of us into the churches as possible so as to deliver a prayer for the end of the pandemic of such force that God would have no choice but to do the right thing. So this seems to be why the numbers are back in upwards freefall and we're once again in the shit. The masks have been demonstrably shown to slow the spread, but no-one is wearing them if they don't have to. No-one has been wearing a face mask on the Tobin Trail or in McAllister park because that's exercise, and walking a chihuahua at two miles per hour apparently counts as exercise.

Arseholes are quite naturally blaming the Black Lives Matter march attended by a fraction of the city's population, and every single one of them masked, because it's always the fault of those who have the most to lose. That's how it works, I guess.

We approach the Den and I can already hear the country music. Trucks are lined up outside and the place looks like a gymnasium. Bears abound in La Vernia, and I presume some local sports team will be known as the La Vernia Bears or similar, hence the Den. I assume bears have dens. It seems like a quiet town. I find it impossible to imagine what it must be like to grow up here. I have no frame of reference.

Masks, on the other hand, don't abound in La Vernia, at least not here, even if the Den is otherwise observing all of the other social distancing procedures. We find a table in what really, really looks like a gymnasium and order iced tea and beer from a waitress with false eyelashes like a couple of spiders. Five or six flatscreen televisions are mounted high up on the walls around the room, three of them tuned to Fox News, currently in the middle of an opinion piece which actually seems to be criticising Trump.

'Maybe the tables are turning,' I say to my wife.

We order food and are given an electronic buzzer which will go off when its ready, letting us know we can go to collect it from the serving hatch.

A man named Bubba now appears on Fox News, a NASCAR driver. NASCAR is some sort of motor racing event associated with economically impoverished white people. Bubba seems to be mixed race and the news item concerns what seemed to be a hangman's noose left in his dressing room. We're trying to work out if it was racially motivated, just a joke, or merely a bit of rope coincidentally resembling a noose which happened to be there and we're all way too sensitive these days. The feature which follows is some woman explaining what great jobs our cops do, so I guess the tables, if they have turned at all, haven't actually turned that much.

The buzzer goes off. I collect our food, and it is genuinely excellent, way above what we had begun to anticipate. It has been worth the expedition. The coronavirus has returned worse than before, and the Texas sky is presently full of Saharan dust, but we're glad we got out, just for this one evening.

Victoria

My wife has taken a week off work. It's Thursday and we still haven't really been anywhere, and I can tell she's already having pensive thoughts about the coming Monday. So we're having a day trip, but somehow we're having trouble working up our customary enthusiasm. We always seem to go to the same places, New Braunfels or Boerne or Corpus Christi or Austin. I have a look at the map, realising we've never been south-east. Corpus Christi is on the Texas coast almost directly south from San Antonio, while New Braunfels and Austin are approximately east, leaving a massive quarter cheese slice of terra incognito of which I know little and Bess has only passing knowledge. The largest town is called Victoria as one heads south-east for the coast from San Antonio and it has a zoo, so fuck it - that's what we're doing today. It's an adventure.

Leaving the city, we pass through China Grove which constitutes another first. Apparently it's our white trash neighbourhood, which is interesting. My understanding of San Antonio is that the eastside is mostly African-American, and everywhere else is Hispanic, with white people scattered here and there according to economic circumstances; but it turns out that us crackers actually have our own 'hood and wow we sure do seem to pass a whole lot of trailer homes and RV parking facilities as we head south-east on Rigsby, with plenty of dollar stores and hardly a taquería to be seen. Amazingly there's a garbage collection facility actually called White Trash Services, suggesting someone has a sense of humour. Checking on the internet, I find this was in Victoria rather than China Grove, but it's probably not hard to see how my memory could have misfiled the information.

The two hours to Victoria - maybe under two hours - are uneventful but interesting because I've never seen this part of Texas and it's been a while since Bess passed through. The landscape is different to what we usually see on the other side of the city, very green, almost English in appearance and with a lot of cows. Also, its coastal lowland so the air is thicker, more humid, and we begin to notice great drapes of Spanish moss trailing from the trees. We pass through La Vernia, where the remains of Bess's father were interred for reasons none of us can work out given the lack of any obvious familial connection to the place; then the towns of Pandora, Nixon, and Smiley, which I mention because I'm still entertained by the names which have been given to towns in America. I say towns, but some of them are technically cities, and I still have no idea how the classification works.

I grew up in an English town, a conurbation of several thousand people living in houses built next to each other, a place one could expect to cross on foot from one side to the other in less than an hour. English cities are similar, except bigger and with more people, and it might take a day or longer to walk from one side to the other. However, here in Texas, one may pass three homes on the highway, each separated by about a mile of open land, then find out that the place somehow counts as a town, implying the presence of at least a general store, or something a bit more suggestive of town life behind some patch of trees which you may or may not have noticed; or the same intermittent string of dwellings will suddenly coalesce into what anyone who ever saw a western movie will recognise as Main Street with a town hall and maybe even a square; and sometimes such places are referred to as cities for what I presume to be legislative reasons.

Anyway, Nixon is named after one of the town's founders, in case anyone was wondering.

Arriving in Victoria, we decide to eat, so we pick Casa Jalisco because for some reason it's hard to go wrong with a Mexican diner named after the state of Jalisco. As we enter, I tell Bess that Jalisco gets its name from xalli- the Nahuatl word for sand, Hispanicised with a j after the conquest. I probably tell her this every time we enter a diner bearing a variation on the name, but she doesn't seem to mind. I've never been to Jalisco in Mexico but I assume it's sandy.

The diner is operating at 50% capacity, so we're some distance from the nearest table, six people and a kid, none of them wearing masks. Bess overhears one of them explaining how she ain't gon' wear no dang mask 'cause ain't no sayin' that it matters none nor makes no difference nohow. It's hard to tell whether or not this is directed at us, but it's also getting hard to care. Idiots have become very much a public phenomenon of late, so there's not much point in worrying about one or two poorly informed individuals.

The food is great but there's too much of it.

The zoo, which we gather hasn't been open long, bills itself as the Texas Zoo. The reason for the seemingly unimaginative title turns out to be that the majority of the animals are indigenous - black vultures, turkey vultures, white tailed deer, and others. They're creatures I encounter on a near daily basis in some cases, but it's still a pleasure to see them up close. Critters remind us that life isn't all plague and Guantanamo Bay and Adolf Hitler abruptly downgraded to a man who had some very interesting ideas but went about it all wrong. Sometimes we need that reminder.

The highlight is the bunnies, a whole colony of Flemish Giants, about twenty or thirty of them all sat around their enclosure twitching their noses, with the only activity coming from a group of babies all bouncing around in an adjacent pen. We watch them for about thirty minutes then leave with a warm feeling.

The drive home is uneventful, as was the drive out, which is fine. Not every day has to be life-changing, just something to hit the reset button is usually enough.

Pearsall

The United States Postal Service now, for reasons best known to itself, automatically photographs your mail prior to delivery, allowing my wife to go online and take a quick look at what the mailman will  bring later on. Unfortunately we see that one of our letters will be a citation for something or other from the city and a case number is just visible through the thin paper of the envelope. We were driving to Pearsall today, but now we're waiting in for the mail, trying to work out what our stupid neighbour has found to complain about this time. We guess it must be something to do with our trees, but mainly because we can't think of anything else; unless he's completely lost it and now suspects that we're collaborating with an underground race of mole people and have built a structurally illegal staircase within our own home so as to facilitate their proposed war against the surface dwellers. The mail usually arrives by eleven on Saturday, but there's been nothing. Eventually we leave anyway, assuming it to be one of those occasional Saturdays when the mail doesn't show up until late afternoon; so we drive over to Target and buy ourselves a little American flag for a couple of dollars.

To start at the beginning, I never met my wife's grandfather. He was gone before I could get here, but he's one person I wish I could have met because I think I would have liked him. His name was Harlan and he was nicknamed Fuzz, originally in reference to his copious blonde hair, but retained with an ironic twist once he went bald on top. As soon as my wife told me this I thought of the old boys I knew at work, the generation who lived through the second world war and whose sense of humour was apparently an international phenomenon. Asked about his nationality when crossing back over into the States from Mexico, Fuzz would say Texan with what I imagine to have been a wry but resolute smile. He was quiet and not given to ostentatious displays of emotion, yet when his favourite chicken went missing - whom he'd named Miss Chicken - the depth of his affection was exposed in his smile when she came back, despite previous protestations that she was only a chicken and sometimes they wander off.

He's buried in the cemetery in Pearsall, a small town surrounded by a lot of wide open space some fifty miles south of San Antonio. My wife grew up there, and that's where her family are from. Its main industry seems to have been either oil or peanuts, depending on which bit of the internet you're looking at. There's a monumental peanut on the side of the highway as you leave town bearing the legend, world's largest peanut, 55.000.000 lbs marketed annually; but the peanut has clearly seen better days, and its claim seems to raise more questions than it answers. The town had a population of around ten-thousand last time anyone counted, but I get the feeling the figure may since have reduced somewhat. The house in which so many of my wife's family were born was once in an orchard but is now surrounded by trailer homes. We went to have a look. There was a wild pig kept inside a tiny cage outside one of them so we didn't stick around.

Each Memorial Day, Fuzz used to visit the cemetery to embellish the headstones of his fellow veterans with small flags, just as a gesture of respect and camaraderie. Edi - his daughter and my wife's aunt - had been to Pearsall to visit the family plot and noticed that someone had continued this practice, although the spot where Fuzz's remains are now buried had been missed; so that's why we're driving to Pearsall. I've already pointed out that Edi could surely have popped into the local Walmart, picked up one of those little flags for a dollar or two and addressed the oversight rather than just telling the rest of us about it; but Bess has taken it upon herself to plant a flag on her grandfather's grave simply because it's something she wants to do, because that's what Fuzz did for others.

Besides, it's a day out when we've hardly been anywhere for the last two months due to the lockdown. Our part of Texas hasn't been hit too bad by COVID-19, possibly because everything is kind of spread out and we have a decent mayor who does his job properly and listens to epidemiologists rather than angry fucknuggets who regard being required to wear a face mask and skip church for a week or two as a violation of their civil rights. A few places are starting to open up at reduced capacity, but both Bess and myself are still wearing masks in public, and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future. I still don't understand why anyone would consider it an inconvenience, given the reason for wearing them.

Pearsall is as I remember it from a couple of previous visits, hot, quiet, and spread out with not many people around during the day. There seem to be a lot of high street stores now closed down, even boarded up - sometimes three in a row, one after the other. I have an unfortunate feeling this may simply be a sign of the times for Pearsall rather than anyone's business specifically going under as a result of the lockdown.

We drive to the cemetery, plant our little flag, then stand around and think about the dead for a while. Most of the names in the Arnold plot are familiar to me by now, although there are still a few empty plots where blank stones await carving in honour of those presumably still living. I may even be one of them. I don't know.

Job done, we head back onto the highway, then stop off at Triple C being as it's past lunchtime. Triple C is a diner which you could probably justifiably call a restaurant, a steak place. I never really saw what the fuss was with steak until I ate at Triple C, yet the last time we came it wasn't that great - which was weird and unexpected and hopefully a one-off dip in the graph. The waitress points a gun which reads temperature at my forehead so as to ascertain whether or not I have the coronavirus, and we are shown to a table. We order salad and steak.

The walls are covered in square panels of wood bearing the brands of different ranchers, some of whom have presumably supplied Triple C with its meat. Each brand is embellished with the name of the rancher and the location of the ranch, mostly Texas, but a few further afield, Kentucky and the like. I study the designs and realise that they are burned into the wood, and were therefore most likely made with an actual brand, which is probably about as far as I need to go with that train of thought. Most of them are identifiable as letters, the initials of the rancher - JR, TJ and the like; but some comprise more esoteric symbols, stars, squiggles, heavily stylised versions of the initials and so on. A couple of them remind me of symbols reputedly seen on the side of flying saucers, notably one famously reported by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. I'm able to recall the name Lonnie Zamora without having to look it up, and I don't know whether I should be proud of this fact or slightly saddened.

The salad is amazing. The steak is okay, but nothing special compared to what is served at either Charlie's or the Hungry Farmer in San Antonio. Oh well...

We arrive home and the mail has been. The citation turns out to be a routine thing which comes around every year. Our trees and bushes are obstructing the alley at the back, so it's thankfully nothing to do with our stupid neighbour. It will take about an hour to trim it all back, just as it did last time and the time before, and so it's really nothing to worry about.

It's difficult to say quite what connects all of the above beyond belonging to the same day, but I'm sure there's something.

The Terrorflakes March Again

It seems that racism still exists despite all of our good work last weekend, and so here we are again. This time we're in Alamo Heights so it's a more localised deal than the previous Saturday. Alamo Heights somehow counts as a city in its own right with its own town hall within the limits of San Antonio. The city of Alamo Heights covers an area of roughly two square miles with a population of around seven-thousand, so really it's just a neighbourhood. I still haven't quite got used to the American application of the term city which seems more to do with legal status than volume or population density, but the shorthand version is that Alamo Heights is the affluent, mostly white neighbourhood, the place where all the local millionaires live. Naturally the news that Alamo Heights would be having its own Black Lives Matter march was greeted with a degree of sneering and scoffing along the lines of how yes, we're sure they're all very much concerned about the well-being of the guy who mows their lawns; but, as my wife pointed out, inverted snobbery doesn't really help anyone and, if anything, a march to raise awareness in Alamo Heights might arguably be more on point than one in a more economically challenged neighbourhood wherein the residents already understand the whole deal with cops and black people.

We're assembled in the HEB parking lot on Broadway. It's a little after ten in the morning. The march seems to be a couple of hundred people - big enough to make a noise, yet not big enough to stop traffic - and they're already heading down to the high school about half a mile away. Placards wave, voices chant the now familiar call and response slogans, and Bess and I hurry along the sidewalk to catch up as we were about ten minutes late. There are a few less mobile demonstrators at the side of the road, an old black guy holding a sign at the bus stop clenching a fist in cheery solidarity as we pass. I expected the march to be mostly white given the locale, but it's pretty much an even blend of everyone. I also expected armed and overmoneyed shitheads protecting their front lawns from Antifa terrorists such as ourselves, given the locale and the thrust of our President's most recent addresses.

The recent rioting, so he appears to believe, has been orchestrated by Antifa, a terrorist organisation formed by snowflakes, snowflakes being people who want to ban everything because it offends them - it's a word they use because they're worried that they might get in trouble if they just called us faggots, which is what they really seem to mean; so somehow we're both snowflakes and terrorists. I therefore propose that we're actually terrorflakes which is easier to remember and is arguably funnier.

Anyway, thankfully I'm wrong, and the usual defenders of freedom have failed to show thus allowing us to get on with our unconstitutionally holding of slightly different opinions unmolested. One car slows so that it's driver can bravely yell all lives matter from the window, thus teaching us the error of our reverse-racist ways. A minute later, a monster truck cruises slowly down Broadway - well, not a monster truck so much as simply a ludicrously inflated vehicle of a kind resembling a Jeff Koons version of a kiddie's toy and which is traditionally driven by overcompensating men with tiny, tiny penises* - with a massive flag in the back, the stars and stripes but all in black but for a central red line. I'm familiar with the variant featuring a central blue line favoured by those who think the cops are doing an amazing job, but I'm not sure about this variation beyond that it seems potentially provocative.

We arrive at the high school, which seems a little lacking in ambition as a destination given that we can still see HEB simply by looking back along Broadway. The word gets around that we'll be walking a little further to Alamo Heights city hall, so that's what we do. We're there and duly milling around in about another ten minutes or so. Something seems to be going on, but it's hard to say what, but I'm distracted by the sight of some bloke in a Queens Park Rangers shirt.

'English?' I ask, because it's obvious that I am.

He isn't, but tells me he's an international fan.

'I used to know the bloke who did In the Loft, the Queens Park Rangers fanzine,' I tell him. 'This was back in the nineties, mind.'

The editor of In the Loft was the younger brother of one of the people who edited the Millwall fanzine, The Lion Roars. I used to work for The Lion Roars, and regularly found my work pinched and reprinted without either permission or even bothering to tell me in the pages of In the Loft, whose editor I therefore regarded as a bit of an arsehole, but there doesn't really seem to be much point going into the details; and the guy asks me who I support.

'Millwall, I suppose,' which is as good an answer as I'm able to give, and my support is vague and based mainly on how many Millwall fans I still consider friends. I could have said Gillingham.

'I'm just glad to see you're not a Manchester United supporter,' I add, because it's always Manchester fucking United.

He laughs, and I'm relieved that he gets the joke.

Some guy hands me a leaflet and starts talking about what all this means to him, then suggests that we might like to think about what Jesus said, and if we're not sure what Jesus said, then he knows some people who would be happy to explain. Both Bess and I stare at the city hall as he rambles on, waiting for him to get the hint and fuck off. Later it turns out that one of the organisers has officially told him to fuck off on the grounds that the permit secured on behalf of the march said nothing about the distribution of Jesus leaflets. Personally I'm slightly irritated that someone thought it would be cool to capitalise on the gathering in the hope of recruiting. It's just plain rude.

One of the organisers talks about why we're here today with the aid of a megaphone. He talks about Breonna Taylor, shot eight times in her own apartment back in March for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever. As with the march on the previous weekend, the cops maintain a low-key presence.

Eventually we march back up Broadway. Another monster truck passes, this one full of muscular young men with baseball caps and shitty bumfluff moustaches, and with two giant flags flown from the rear. We see the same truck again a couple of minutes later, and again at the intersection after that. Either the driver is lost or, as seems more likely, is trolling the march, because we Terrorflakes hate the sight of the flag and the thought of the freedom it represents, or summink. Bess takes a photograph and we look up the license plate. The vehicle is owned by someone who lives way out in the sticks, and who has apparently driven all the way here so as to share their mighty flags with us. I guess they're probably just bored jocks or shitheads who figured it would be hilarious. At least I haven't seen any openly carried assault rifles today.

The march has been small and relatively quiet, but it felt like something worth doing.

*: This sentence may appear to be racist against men with tiny, tiny penises but is in fact ironically mocking racism against men with tiny, tiny penises, I rather think you will find.

Drive-By Graduation

Although America was designed as an alternative to the stuffy hierarchical bureaucracies from which its inventors originally set sail, it has spent the last two centuries rendering every last deed and word as the most important and stately thing ever. For something which regards itself as better than monarchy, we sure seem to spend a lot of time and energy on approximating all the trappings right down to the last, most pointlessly baroque detail. There's a ceremony for everything, because everyone gets to be king for a day, or so the promise would have it. The main features of my own departure from my English secondary school were, for example, that I was present at the school for a period of time, and then I was absent from the school for the period which followed, and I never went back and that was that. Here there's a ceremony involving caps, gowns, awards, speeches and so on. I've been to one American high school graduation ceremony. It lasted about three hours, comprising a line of kids in gowns marching across a stage punctuated by the worst motivational speeches you've ever heard, material which could have been written for William Shatner at the height of his gestural powers.

As these young people go boldly into the future whence destiny shalt be their red carpet and the fame we see snatched from the jaws of failure here today in this most hallowed space blah blah blah...

Thankfully, every cloud has a silver lining and it seems that the global pandemic is no exception, and so are we invited to a drive-by graduation. Our boy's cousin has finished school this year. We'll put on our masks, drive past his house, wave, call out well done, and his mother will hand us cup cakes through the car window.

That's the plan.

We pull up to the house and notice the personalised license plate of the vehicle in front. 'That's Byron,' I say, surprised. 'I didn't think he would come. In fact I guess he's leaving already.'

We watch the truck drive away as we park in the space it has vacated. Byron underwent serious eye-surgery this weekend, and Bess suggests he was probably driven here by one of his friends. She glances across to the lawn of the house upon which twenty or thirty unmasked persons are gathered. 'I don't think he was too happy about this gathering. He's been pretty keen about sticking to the lockdown.'

This doesn't sound like Byron, a man rarely seen without an entourage of fellow barbecue enthusiasts, but then he's full of surprises and I'm sure the surgery will have had a sobering effect.

'I thought this was a drive-by.'

'Me too,' says Bess, and we get out of the car, donning our masks.

The graduate is with his friends in a group. I still think of him as a little ginger kid with piercing eyes, but he's taller than I am and has somehow come to resemble a young, muscular Alan Partridge. His friends look as though they should be fooling around on yachts. His mother comes over and herds us towards the table with the cupcakes. I take one with soft green icing tasting like nothing found in nature, the sort which is actually quite nice every once in a while.

No-one is wearing a mask.

We do the elbow bump greeting with the graduate's older brother, who now resembles Rick Moranis. Bess jokes that I'm enjoying the pandemic because it means I'm no longer obliged to hug complete strangers, which is true. I still don't like the elbow bump though. It replaces handshakes and other forms of physical contact which I never saw as necessary in the first place.

We congratulate the graduate for having lived to the age at which he's no longer required to attend high school. He seems happy. He has plans to become a veterinarian, or something in that direction.

'You remember Jeff?' my wife suggests.

I sort of do, and Jeff grins, and his great big hand sails towards mine like a side of ham. Contact is made and we shake unnecessarily.

I hear myself observing that the term drive-by made me think of Boyz n the Hood, but it's the wrong crowd for such references. 'We're the only people wearing masks,' I say to Bess.

'I know. We'll go in a minute.'

I meet a few more people I've met before but don't remember, and then we shuffle back to the car and head home. As we leave, I gaze at them all stood around on the lawn and wonder if this has been some kind of low-level protest at having to wear a mask, inspired by those fucknuggets in the news who've decided that it somehow violates their constitutional rights. None of them exactly look like Trumpanzees, but then they're all white Caucasian, all wealthy, all well-dressed in a city with a 62% Latin or Hispanic populace.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

I try not to think about it.