The 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass
A brown Oldsmobile, a velour back seat, and the khaki that Houston turned in the years the oil money still came.
Darker and warmer browns are associated with the earth and a degree of warmth and selflessness. Flat browns like Khaki are associated with a degree of stress, overwork, and a degree of spiritual blockage. In a fresh, new state khaki speaks of an openness to possibilities to grow warm, or get muddier with its absorption of the pollutants and detritus of daily life. I was the family empath. I felt a force that began a degradation of that neutral aura to a dulled contaminated environment. I somehow felt cursed by it all as i grew up. The velour seating in that vehicle seemed to absorb all that a child could possibly do to defile its newness. Katchup, chocolate, urine and vomit alike quickly mashed the springy and fresh surface of the upholstery into a matted brown mess in the back seats.
My parents occupations and habits didn't help much. My dad worked in construction, he was heavyset and came home in the summer with salt stains in his work shirts and with the chunks of hardwood particles from planed millwork. My mom, despite quitting smoking when having her children, was slowly starting to get hooked again. Both would bicker about the quality of the car quickly degrading into a surface that resembled more dirty movie seats than a luxury interior covering. He would blame her for the smoking in the car, she would blame him for getting into her car with unkempt hygiene, and the both would blame the kid in the back for being the kid in the back.
The car was a daily representation of the optimism and the crippling fear of loss that the late '70's and early '80s represented in Houston. The 1970s saw an explosion of the local economy fueled by the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The record high oil prices saw an explosion of business activities, homebuilding, commercial construction, and general amazing times and newness, it was wall to wall, and it was off-white, Like Pam's luxury apartment in Urban Cowboy. The honest '70's browns gave way to an '80's off-white opulence and seemingly every working class stiff wanted a piece of the action. My parents moved back to Houston in 1975 from northern Mississippi. It was so bad that they were living in the back of a Ford E-series box van. My dad had quit work as a project estimator for one of the largest commercial contractors in Mississippi. He felt that he could be a trim carpenter and make more money. He miscalculated. Of that time, he spoke of the bidding process and said that he couldn't compete with the embedded companies in the area, who would win open bids by having an inside track with the handful of construction companies. If your competitor knew the contractor, the contractor would just tell his preferential company the price, then ask them to under bid by 1 dollar. It was hard for him and I imagine it was painful for him to take my mom and my infant brother back to Houston in the back of a box van.
They headed for greener pastures. Houston was flush with easy money and credit for seemingly everyone. The new financial tools that were available in the '70's oil boom were coming due. These financial tools were new back then and were sold as an amazing opportunity with the 1970's oil market. With the 1970's oil crisis, a barrel of oil adjusted for inflation peaked at $113.00 a barrel. About the time my parents new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was showing signs of wear and tear, oil overproduction from Saudi Arabia combined with low demand crashed the price of a barrel of oil to 20 dollars. Over a couple of drinks, a lifelong Houstonian has a unique ability to speak anecdotally about the good, the bad, and the ugly. For me, I think it had the profound ability to separate my perceptions of life from my brother, despite being seven years separate in age. We have uniquely different experiences about this time, but braved the same events of lost homes, downsizing, and domestic violence episodes.
My dad was obligated to take out an adjustable rate mortgage to complete the house I grew up in, the house my Dad, always in retrospect, says he was pressured to build by the illusions and expectations of substantial wealth. Initially, the mortgage was manageable, with a monthly payment of $1800 in 2018 dollars, but that quickly ballooned to $6500 a month by 1986. Our house was promptly foreclosed on and we were forced to move into a rental house.
Of this time, my dad speaks of not being able to find any work for his cabinet shop, a modest 2000 square foot building he built on unincorporated land shortly after moving back in 1980. He speaks of that time as if it were utterly dystopian. My dad, like most of us, lacks vision to see the economic landscape in front of him. He did however have an ability to speak of it with a degree of anecdotal seasonings that I have vivid memories of. He was susceptible to hyperbole and based his understandings of life on them.
He would speak of how Mexican immigrants came in and bid the work too low for us to live. He refers to them as "Jose Gonzales and his pack of banderos". He once told me of a framer he worked with, who had a metal building out in Angleton, TX -- his hotel as dad's colleague called it. He kept his workers living in it and every morning at 5 AM he would wake them up, get them on the truck and roll them 40 miles north up HWY 288 to Houston to frame houses.
We talk about these situations a lot, and who's to blame, and how it's complicated. He blamed immigrants for his hard business life in the 1980s, and he still blames "Jose" to this day. I don't blame him exactly for the feeling of helplessness -- of not being able to will his own personal success; of what he was on the hook for; that his business couldn't pay for what he had worked so hard for. But thinking back into being on that grey mashed velour seat in the back of their oldsmobile cutlass, I do remember the times of vanity. Of how Mom and Dad would brag to family and friends alike about how they did build the house of their dreams. Watching all that prosperity circle the bottom of the drain in the 1980s, I saw how potent hyperbole was. It provided an easy explanation to an impossible problem. It's far easier to blame others than ourselves. I try to tell him, do not blame the individual who was forced to live in that metal shed for work, despite your best efforts not to. Blame the guys exploiting and breaking labor laws. It's my best answer to not have a long drawn out fight over the topic and I don't necessarily believe it. I think everyone is complicit. Some people buy organic and heritage food products to ensure they are not eating hormones or pesticides, but I would venture to say that homeowners are not privy to the working conditions of those who built the house they live in. Therein lies the crippling nature of the problem. Isaac Rushkoff explains this point brilliantly:
What's important to notice is that each industrial innovation diminished the value of one human element after another. Identifiably crafted products, such as the manuscript, gave way to mechanically reproducible ones, such as the printed book. Instead of relating to products through the human who made them, people relate to the brand on the package, and so on. People are disconnected from the value chain. This was by design, even if the intentions behind the design have been submerged and forgotten. Remember, industrialism's primary intent was to subvert a rising middle class and their peer to peer market system. Merchants and craftspeople were creating value from the bottom up and threatening the passively earned income of the aristocracy. The object of the game was to get people out of the way, because they create value independently, demand compensation, and value their relationships over their purchases. The game remains the same to this day.
— Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, loc. 515
I can't speak for the past prior to the 1980s, but my unique small-business, trade-skill upbringing was something that I was never especially proud of. Mom had a massive inferiority complex about Dad's hygiene, notably the sweaty smell and dust he would leave in her car. There was a degree of shame I remembered.
It is worth noting that my first memories of american politics were of race baiting. The Willie Horton political advertisement that George HW Bush released in the 1988 presidential election had a profound effect on my parents' despair. It solidified their political beliefs, as hatred of the other permeated our community. In our present day political climate, H.W Bush has benefitied from a fresh public relations veneer. Thanks to the printing industry selling musings of the greatest generation back their boomer children, HW Bush had successfully papered over his vileness into a fresh facade of a grandpa skydiver and a veteran fighter jock. The ex president's image softened considerably by befriending Dana Carvey, who crafted effigy of H.W Bush's tineared presidency was brilliant in displaying the tone-deafness of his administration. He successfully moved the Lee Atwater political strategy of abstraction into the digital age. His presidency was quite painful for me; I had to do a lot of personal work to unlearn the culture for which he was responsible.
''Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life...He never hated anyone. He knew what his mother and my mother always knew: Hatred corrodes the container it's carried in.''(Alan Simpson, Eulogy of George H.W Bush)
In time we can always find somebody else to blame.
Between 1987-1989 we moved to a rental house that we eventually had to leave due to costs. So the four of us moved into a one bedroom trailer next to the shop, so that we could get financially healthy. #tinyhouse
A Mexican immigrant family lived at the end of the property in another trailer. The first fight I was in was during that time. I was 7. The older brother would bully me, and he was setting up his younger brother, who was my age, to do the same.
I remember not knowing what was going on, and that my family had significantly disappeared during that time. My mom, dad, and brother were not around during that time. I was home alone for the most part.
Mom was trying to become a real estate agent, Dad had to find jobs to fill the shop, and my brother was away from home, in and out of trouble. I was left alone with these two boys continually beating me up. The first fight I was ever in, I lost my cool and beat the hell out of the little brother, who was my age. I pinned him to the ground in a sand pit and started smashing his face until Alex, the older brother pulled him off me. They didn't mess with me again. I remember them running off, and I went back to the trailer, locked the door and started crying uncontrollably until my mom got home later that evening. I don't know what happened to that family. They lived under a cell phone tower in a row of 4 trailers positioned side by side. I bet it was as hard on them as it was us. The hate seemed to flow back then, and I had zero warning or preparation. We were all thrown into it.
I remember during that time we had to take charity from the Baptist church, with parishioners coming into our home convincing us to join. I never took to it. When we went, I remember bible school was punitive. The activities were "turn the book to a specific Bible passage". I was always last and was scolded in front of the others. I mainly looked out of the window waiting to go home, while my family had to go through their socialization rituals. I was thankfully too young to deal with all that hellfire and brimstone. I found my own spirituality in the floodplain that surrounded the property and creeks that traced through the forests surrounding the property. The church people would come and visit my parents and brother. They would ask me to go outside like some scene playing out of a young Charles Foster Kane out at play, while the grownups planned his future without his knowledge.
They would regularly read about Armageddon in Revelation -- that the world was coming to an end. This was a natural fear at the time. The Gulf War had started and televangelist programming on the television were talking end of days and prophecies of the four horsemen. It was the first time I began to think of evangelism as an act that corrupted personal liberty. I was spared the televised zealots marketing fear. I was free to hike and fish in the snake-infested floodplain creek beds and marshes. It was where I became most comfortable. As the family began to disintegrate, I loved to hide out there. I would come back to plates flying into the wall or the army recruiters my Dad had called for my brother. I knew every bend of the creeks back there, as well as every ridge and valley. People went back there to get fucked up. I knew where their camps were. The only time I thought about suicide, I was going to hang myself there. I felt I was alone. Those feelings passed, thankfully. I dealt with them on my own, because if my family knew about them, it probably would have been worse. By that time the Oldsmobile interior was absolutely trashed and was falling apart, it was gifted to my brother as his first car. It would later be the first car he got into degrees of trouble with. My brother figured out he could crush up sleeping pills and put them into my parents coffee pot. They would be out cold in the evening and he could sneak out of the trailer after everyone went to sleep. This worked until he was caught with friends vandalizing houses. He would eventually drive through an unprotected left turn and get t-boned, putting that car out of its misery and beginning a streak of nine vehicles he totaled in amazing ways.
My parents bought a lovely car from an individual seller. It was a gleaming grey 1988 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. It was owned by an airline pilot who kept the vehicle in a climate controlled garage. The wire rims were pristine, not a smidge of road dirt or rust on any of the chrome. The inside was a smooth grey leather, smelling of the rich earthy smells of a tannery. I remember getting off the bus one day and seeing it parked in the trailer carport. A crowd of Dad's workers, Mom and my brother were surrounding it. The ceremony had a degree of superficial pride about it. At that time, I was a quiet witness, not able to have an opinion. I just got off the bus and saw changes to routine, like new toys in the driveway.