I spent August and September of that presidential election year driving the Sunliner around Dallas, apartment-hunting (even after all this time sorely missing my GPS unit and frequently stopping to ask for directions). Nothing seemed right. At first I thought that was about the apartments themselves. Then, as I began to get a better sense of the city, I realized it was about me.

The simple truth was that I didn’t like Dallas, and eight weeks of hard study was enough to make me believe there was a lot not to like. The Times Herald (which many Dallas-ites routinely called the Slimes Herald ) was a tiresome juggernaut of nickel boosterism. The Morning News might wax lyrical, talking about how Dallas and Houston were “in a race to the heavens,” but the skyscrapers of which the editorial spoke were an island of architectural blah surrounded by rings of what I came to think of as The Great American Flatcult. The newspapers ignored the slum neighborhoods where the divisions along racial lines were just beginning to melt a little. Further out were endless middle-class housing developments, mostly owned by veterans of World War II and Korea. The vets had wives who spent their days Pledging the furniture and Maytagging the clothes.

Most had 2.5 children. The teenagers mowed lawns, delivered the Slimes Herald on bicycles, Turtle Waxed the family car, and listened (furtively) to Chuck Berry on transistor radios. Maybe telling their anxious parents he was white.

Beyond the suburban houses with their whirling lawn-sprinklers were those vast flat tracts of empty. Here and there rolling irrigators still serviced cotton crops, but mostly King Cotton was dead, replaced by endless acres of corn and soybeans. The real Dallas County crops were electronics, textiles, bullshit, and black money petro-dollars. There weren’t many derricks in the area, but when the wind blew from the west, where the Permian Basin is, the twin cities stank of oil and natural gas.

The downtown business district was full of sharpies hustling around in what I came to think of as the Full Dallas: checked sport

coats, narrow neckwear held down with bloated tie clips (these clips, the sixties version of bling, usually came with diamonds or plausible substitutes sparkling in their centers), white Sansabelt pants, and gaudy boots with complex stitching. They worked in banks and investment companies.

They sold soybean futures and oil leases and real estate to the west of the city, land where nothing would grow except jimson and tumbleweed. They clapped each other on the shoulders with beringed hands and called each other son. On their belts, where businessmen in 2011 carry their cell phones, many carried handguns in hand-tooled holsters.

There were billboards advocating the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; billboards showing a snarling Nikita Khrushchev (NYET, COMRADE KHRUSHCHEV, the billboard copy read, WE WILL BURY YOU! ); there was one on West Commerce Street that read THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY FAVORS INTEGRATION. THINK ABOUT IT!

That one had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society. Twice, on businesses whose names suggested they were Jewish-owned, I saw soaped swastikas.

I didn’t like Dallas. No sir, no ma’am, no way. I hadn’t liked it from the moment I checked into the Adolphus and saw the restaurant maître d’ gripping a cringing young waiter by the arm and shouting into his face. Nevertheless, my business was here, and here I would stay. That was what I thought then.

10

On the twenty-second of September, I finally found a place that looked livable. It was on Blackwell Street in North Dallas, a detached garage that had been converted into a pretty nice duplex apartment. Greatest advantage: air-conditioning. Greatest disadvantage: the owner-landlord, Ray Mack Johnson, was a racist who shared with me that if I took the place, it would be wise to stay away from nearby Greenville Avenue, where there were a lot of mixed-race jukejoints and coons with the kind of knives he called “switchers.”

“I got ary thing in the world against niggers,” he told me. “Nosir. It was God who cursed them to their position, not me. You know that, don’t you?”

“I guess I missed that part of the Bible.”

He squinted suspiciously. “What are you, Methodist?”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed a lot safer than saying I was, denominationally speaking, nothing.

“You need to get in the Baptist way of churching, son. Ours welcomes newcomers. You take this place, and maybe some Sunday you can come with me n my wife.”

“Maybe so,” I agreed, reminding myself to be in a coma that Sunday. Possibly dead.

Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, had returned to his original scripture.

“You see, Noah got drunk this one time on the Ark, and he was a-layin on his bed, naked as a jaybird. Two of his sons wouldn’t look at him, they just turned the other way and put a blanket over him. I don’t know, it might’ve been a sheet. But Ham—he was the coon of the family—looked on his father in his nakedness, and God cursed him and all his race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. So there it is. That’s what’s behind it. Genesis, chapter nine. You go on and look it up, Mr. Amberson.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, telling myself that I had to go someplace, I couldn’t afford to stay at the Adolphus indefinitely. Telling myself I could live with a little racism, that I wouldn’t melt. Telling myself it was the temper of the times, and it was probably the same just about everywhere. Only I didn’t quite believe it. “I’ll think it over and let you know in a day or two, Mr. Johnson.”

“You don’t want to wait too long, son. This place will go fast. You have a blessed day, now.”

11

The blessed day was another scorcher, and apartment-hunting was thirsty work. After leaving Ray Mack Johnson’s learned company, I felt in need of a beer. I decided to get one on Greenville Avenue. If Mr. Johnson discouraged the neighborhood, I thought I ought to check it out.

He was correct on two counts: the street was integrated (more or less), and it was rough. It was also lively. I parked and strolled, savoring the carny atmosphere. I passed almost two dozen bars, a few second-run movie houses (COME IN IT’S “KOOL” INSIDE, read the banners flapping from the marquees in a hot, oil-smelling Texas wind), and a striptease joint where a streetside barker yelled “Girls, girls, girls, best burley-q in the whole damn world! Best burley-q you’ve ever seen!

These ladies shave, if you know what I mean!” I also passed three or four check-cashing-and-quickie-loan storefronts. Standing bold as brass in front of one—Faith Financial, Where Trust Is Our Watchword—was a chalkboard with THE DAILY LINE printed at the top and FOR AMUSEMENT

ONLY at the bottom. Men in straw hats and suspenders (a look only dedicated punters can pull off) were standing around it, discussing the posted odds. Some had racing forms; some had the Morning News sports section.

For amusement only, I thought. Yeah, right. For a moment I thought of my beachfront shack burning in the night, the flames pulled high into the starry black by the wind off the Gulf.