Subterranean Press, 2002
In literature, I love dirty, sleazy, white trash Texas.
I love sweaty, bloody, cum-stained Texas.
Barefoot, whiskey-breath, evil-eyed Texas.
Strip club, gun rack, conceal carry Texas.
Big-talkin’, neon sign, tornado warning Texas.
I love books that make all us Texans look like felons with barbecue sauce stains on our shirts. Or good Bible-thumping people just one cool breeze away from scandalous sex with the church organist.
No joke. I can’t get enough of that stuff. The best writers of it are Texans themselves. And the best Texas writers are always smartasses. Maybe it’s the heat. It has a way of making a person a little informal. The nicest suit still gets pit stains and feels like a sweat trap once you’re away from air-conditioning for ten minutes, even in October. There are intellectuals in Texas, sure, but who cares about them? I’d rather read about the weird shit happening on those long stretches of I-20.
And that’s why I like this book by unsung Texas treasure, the late Neal Barrett, Jr.
It’s a short one. 205 pages, big printing. You could read it in a day if you got nothin’ else to do. Might take a week if you’re busy. Might take a month if you’re stupid.
Barrett is one of those great writers who are 110% comfortable with characters who are totally insane. He doesn’t stand outside of them, nor does he judge them too much. Instead, Barrett climbs right up their spinal columns and into their craziest thoughts, which he transmits back to us in plain, often amazingly funny and wise, language. It’s a kind of homespun surrealism and it’s the best way to tell this story of what happens when a lowly ex-con peon worker at a small town Texas Chinese restaurant next door to an all-nude strip club, just off of 1-35 in the middle of fucking nowhere, decides to think big.
I wouldn’t call it a tight plot. My best guess is that Barrett merely started writing about this setting and these people and then let it roll from there, with no master plan. He squeezes in his love for World War II fighter plane lore (in a really weird away) and finally starts figuring out how to end it about halfway through. And it works. You don’t read this book for white knuckle suspense. You read it to hang out at the sleaziest roadside attraction in Texas and see who works there. They’ve got to be all off their rockers. Mad genius Barrett tells us all about it and does not disappoint, even in this minor work.
Barrett’s major work, by the way, are some of the most beautiful books you’ll ever read. His The Hereafter Gang had me dreaming for days. Then there are his completely wacky detective novels (Pink Vodka Blues, in particular), which are so brilliantly gut-busting that they’ll make you hate the “funny” guy at your job even more.