First you have to know about the Chili's restaurant in Austin on the corner of Lamar Boulevard and 45th Street. The Reddit pranksters have made it into a sacred spot. It's a meme among memes.
What they don't know is the location has a topless past. Lil Abner's opened in April of 1975. It soon was a haven for bikers and "experienced" dancers who were no longer teens and likely sported a few bruises on their legs and heavy makeup on their smiling faces.
The bar was the first of three topless joints to pay homage to the comic strip. Daisy Mae's opened in North Austin in the former Kicker Jim's Country Disco in 1981. The next year Mammy Yokum's opened in South Austin. The tittie bar trifecta didn't last long.
In December 1984, Lil Abner's burned down. It first they thought it was faulty wiring.
Austin American-Statesman Mon, Dec 03, 1984 ·Page 11
Then Daisy Mae's was torched two months later, and both fires were deemed arson. Daisy Mae's manager Patrick Ellington spoke of threats from unnamed patrons. Some opine bikers get pissed off. Some say it was an inside job. Forty years later there are no clear answers, but plenty of stories to be told.
Austin American-Statesman Wed, Feb 06, 1985 ·Page 19
Mammy Yokum's apparently didn't last as long as the other clubs. The last mention to be found of it in the Austin American-Statesman is in 1983, less than a year from its opening.
Writing has become a family affair for prolific East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
He's jointly penned fiction with his son Keith, his
daughter Kasey edited the new horror anthology “Impossible Monsters,”
which includes a Lansdale story, and the voice guiding the writer's
latest novel “The Thicket” is his father's.
“It's the way he told stories,” Lansdale said of his father, who was
born in 1909 and was 42 when his son was born. “He had a beautiful
voice. He couldn't read or write, but he was a masterful storyteller.”
“The Thicket” is a western set at the turn of the last century narrated by 16-year-old Jack Parker.
Lansdale said the story came to him with what is the book's first
paragraph: “I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and
my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end
up with worse things happening than had already come upon us and that
I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big
angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly
how it was.”
Lansdale doesn't plot his novels and doesn't stick to one genre. He's
known for writing horror, mystery, science fiction, even comic books.
“I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip,” he said.
“I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.”
“The Thicket” has the excitement of Lansdale's pulpier
works, but there's an underlying literary element here that marks the
author as perhaps Texas' finest contemporary writer.
The novel easily draws comparisons to Charles Portis' “True Grit,” given Parker's quest with the help of his mismatched comrades to rescue his sister from bad men.
ut, like a lot of Lansdale's work, Mark Twain lurks.
“Twain is my keystone,” he said. “He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.”
For Lansdale that means a lot of humor, violence and no flinching at tough subjects — particularly racism.
“One of the things I really despise these days in fiction
is political correctness, especially if I'm writing about the past,” he
said. “That's a way of showing you what it was like. People get upset
about certain words used. I don't use those words in my life, but people
did. And for you to think, 'If I just take that word out it'll be OK,'
well, it makes it mean that it never happened, and it did happen. It
disturbed me so much that probably 95 percent of my fiction is affected
by it. I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”
Lansdale had more Southern gothic in mind a la Flannery O'Connor
than he did Western with “The Thicket.” It's full of crisp and funny
dialogue (“That's the way I talk,” he said) and over-the-top characters
very much in the mold of his father, who could crush an apple in his
hand, bust a belt with his chest and fought at carnivals during the
Great Depression. He also was, at least on the surface, a racist.
“His racist rhetoric was about the worst I'd heard, but
he still treated people the same,” Lansdale said. “My dad was raised in
that environment, so he had that generalization. But when he dealt with
people individually he didn't feel that way. I know a lot of people who
have the right words but not the right actions. He's still my hero in
spite of that flaw. His reality and the way he proceeded with his life
is pretty much how I proceed with mine.”
The outsider is well represented in “The Thicket” by
ex-slave grave digger Eustace, and Shorty, a bounty-hunting dwarf.
Neither is anyone's fool. But there is evil lurking in this finely drawn
work as well.
The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English
and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection
“Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college
instructor for seven years before that.
Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”
“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a
different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even
changes a little.
“Odessa has a Westerness to it, a Southwesterness. People
are laconic and slow-talking. They accept things. In East Texas there's
a sense of irony. Life is tough, and there's a tough, mean God out
there.”
Sanderson's Beaumont is the land of the three P's: pine, petroleum and
Pentecostals, where the claustrophobia of the swampland and the
oppressive heat conspire to push the “Baptists behind gated communities
to avoid sin, while the Pentecostals are not afraid to testify,” he
said.
“There's an old saying that things in West Texas can kill you, but in East Texas they just make you wish you were dead.”
Both books are gritty and real with stories steered by those who are on the margins of society.
In “Nothing to Lose,” Roger Jackson
is a small-time private eye who spends most of his free time at the
Nothing to Lose bar, which is a mangled version of East Texas native Janis Joplin's famous lyric (as written by Kris Kristofferson): “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It's a theme that flows through Sanderson's work: The people who are
on the edges of society. He writes in the novel that “we didn't duck
life, as our social and financial betters did, but we were very wary of
it. We knew, eventually, life would just beat us down.”
Sanderson's fictional worlds abound with potential.
“I'm writing about the losers, the ne'er-do-wells, the people who
almost, could of, maybe done it,” he said. “I'm always attracted to
those stories, those people. It's one reason I don't like superheroes. I
don't like people who are all-powerful.”
In “Trashy Behavior,” that includes a prostitute turned
bar owner with a gripping story behind the scar that snakes across her
face. That story and a few others from the book set in the Odessa oil
boom and bust years of the late '70s and early '80s are being reworked
into another novel on the horizon.
In the '60s San Antonio-set story “Bankers,” inspired by his
part-time bank jobs while in high school and later at what was then Southwest Texas State University, Sanderson writes of a teen who is “mostly waiting on my future to find me” but is instead thrust into danger.
“In most of my stories, a character has to confront
something,” he said. The collection's strongest story may well be the
gripping Western “Comancheria,” in which a boy Sanderson describes as
being potentially autistic gets caught among the languages of his
German immigrant family, the Comanches who brutally capture him and the
English-speaking soldiers who save him. Back home in school “not only
did he not trust the Deutsch and American words ... but he distrusted
what the words meant.”
Jim Sanderson
grew up in San Antonio dreaming of escape. Today he's on the short list
of accomplished authors who most effectively evoke the city's essence.
His latest literary mystery, “Dolph's Team,” opens with a
group of middle-aged men drinking beer and telling lies at a South Side
ice house. One of them is murdered in the restroom, and the crew set
out to right the wrong with nothing but a Taser, their reading glasses, a
few beers and a lot of reminiscing about a city constantly evolving.
“There are in fact three San Antonios to me,” said Sanderson, 58, a writing professor at Lamar University
in Beaumont. “The first is the town that I remember. It is a part of
me. It is vivid, even if my memory is faulty — thus, I can remember it
like I want to. The second is the historic San Antonio. I don't mean
just the big incidents of the city, but its growth into what it is
today. The third is the nearly million-population city of today.”
“Dolph's Team,” about a group of aging friends from both sides of the
law investigating the (seemingly) cut-and-dried murder of a friend, is
the fourth Sanderson mystery. He's also an accomplished short story
writer, and many of the characters in the new novel also appear both in
his other mysteries and his most recent story collection “Faded Love.” A
recurring theme is the almosts of life, or, as
writer-turned-bug-exterminator Walter tells the reader: “the importance
of what could have happened.”
“At writers' conferences,” says Sanderson, “we talk about
how the publishing world has changed — or has died. Self-pity and
gallows humor are served at these conferences as desert. So I'm always
reminded that I'm an aging/outsider/loser. But I think that this
disenchantment is a part of growing up. I think that we all feel that
way. I just like to write about characters who really are aging
outsiders who've missed their opportunities.”
His recurring characters give his collective work a view of how lives evolve.
“I'm confirming what I first thought about fiction: It is
the best medium for dealing with time, showing the past and present
working simultaneously,” he said. “So in my stories, no matter how long
they are, I try to show that my characters have a future — in terms of
their hopes, ambitions, loves — and a past, but are stuck in the present
of the story.”
Sanderson cites as a major writing influence the late Three Rivers native James Crumley for his twisting of tried-and-true mystery conventions, and for his sense of place.
San Antonio is indeed a character in “Dolph's Team.” The character Rodney Lee,
a city councilman dreaming of being the city's first black mayor,
epitomizes the ambition of a poor boy from the East Side. Meanwhile,
Dolph, Walter and crew watched Southtown evolve into a trendy spot for
artists. Sanderson's San Antonio clearly evokes his South Side
upbringing.
“There was a mixture of ethnicities, races and income
levels,” he said. “But we were united in feeling that we were outshone
by the North Side. We weren't the cool kids. We didn't have the cool
stuff. We mocked our ethnicities and our backgrounds, but the mocking
was adolescent games. And I think that we came out of that time seeing
those problems as the source of games or humor. Thus we couldn't take
the prejudices that we grew up among seriously.”
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
