CHAPTER TEN: Ninth Street AKA Hell on Earth
Yesterday I began the day with a fourth session of an ongoing root canal that is still not finished. Why is that? Because apparently I have such an intricate relationship with pain that even though I have been, at each session, administered enough Novocain to easily kill the Russian Army, I still feel it when Steve, my wonderful dentist, gets in there and starts digging. So we have to tackle it over multiple torture sessions.
Post-dentist, I went for a pap smear. And while that did not involve anesthesia, and though physically it did not hurt, just putting the old feet in the old stirrups immediately fills my head with a montage of all the things that have gone wrong with my lady plumbing over the years. Like the Epic Ovarian Tumor Episode of 1997. Or the Please Rip It Out Now Hysterectomy of 2008, which came on the heels of far too many stretches of me lying on the bathroom floor, crying out in anguish, as with each monthly cycle my womb, chockfull of fibroids, attempted to destroy me.
Perhaps it was contemplating my history of pain and my internal plumbing that prompted me, as I was driving home to my one-third-of-a-million-dollar palace on the East Side, to take a detour to Clarksville to see if I could sneakily take a picture of the home of my second ex-husband, Narcissus the Plumber, who caused me more pain in sixteen months than all of my tattoos, root canals, and reproductive surgeries put together. Times a billion.
I had not been near his place in perhaps eight years. And even as I approached 9th Street, my head filled with sage advice garnered in the many years of therapy necessitated by that horrific coupling with him. I argued with myself that it was important that I show you all a photo of that house. I argued back that doing so might induce a panic attack of the sort I used to have all the time when I lived there. I shakily reasoned that I could abort the mission at the last second if I spotted him.
As I neared the house-- and honestly for a moment I wasn’t even sure if it was the house, so long has it been since I’d been there-- my gut started to contemplate projectile vomiting. Fortunately, I’d eaten very little courtesy of the dental work pain, so there was nothing for me to hurl. When I did spot a couple of figures sitting on the steps, I didn’t scrutinize. I chickened out, made a hard right, and turned down a side street.
So you’ll just have to take my words for it as I offer you the tale of my brief by hellish time living in Clarksville, where I moved less than a year after buying my house (read: renting it from the bank) on the East Side.
What prompted me to leave my dream home so soon? I was working as a teacher at a private school at the time. One of my students, let’s call her Big Eyes, took a shine to me, and I to her. She said she wanted me to hang out with her dad, a widower. He asked me out. After clearing it with the administration that I was not violating protocol, I agreed to spend an afternoon chatting with him. I’d already met him briefly at a school function, and then a second time when Big Eyes had volunteered him to fix my sink. He seemed funny and charming, as narcissists always deceptively do at the front end, and he was handy with a wrench.
By the time of this rendezvous, January 2006, I was nearly seven full years into my Happy Life of Non-Dating. And though I was not exactly a Poster Child for Impeccable Mental Health, I had come a long way. I’d been sober six years. Henry and I were getting settled in to our Cherrywood House. I was working on another book, Pissed Off, for which I’d received a small contract. Austin Life was pretty great for us. Looking back, I would have to guess that I somehow reasoned that this relative calm, coupled with a belief that taking seven years off from dating, had brought me to a place of Some Wisdom and that I could handle dating in a way I never had been able to handle it before.
So yeah, that’s some pretty blaring foreshadowing, isn’t it? Here’s a tangent for you. Once, long ago, I spilled a Coke into a laptop and, in my panic, decided I need to dry it out. So I grabbed a can of air and I blew it into the keyboard thinking I would fix things but instead, yes, blowing that sticky sugar water deeper into the machine. At the computer store, I insisted the repair guys come out and laugh at me to my face. They consoled me saying that actually, they’d seen worse, like the guy who was angry when he discovered, as he attempted to use the fax function on his computer, that he was unable to slide a piece of paper into his monitor, which he lugged into the shop demanding an explanation.
My point is, of course, that you know what’s coming here, that in diving in headfirst to another relationship, I was conducting the emotional equivalent of blowing the Coke deeper into the machine. So come on then, let’s all take a moment and laugh at the notion that I thought I’d figured out the man thing. Ready? GO AHEAD: HAHAHAHAHAHA. AGAIN!! HAHAHAHAHAHA. But don’t forget, hard as it might seem to believe, and not that it’s really any consolation, but surely somebody somewhere has fucked up worse than me. (I hope it wasn’t you.)
Let’s just speed through the next part of this saga, since Narcissus and I sped our way in real time from giddy false love into unfathomable depths of hell, our poor poor choices taking down several others with us. The time it took for us to go from that first sort-of date to living together was maybe six weeks. At first it was not an official living together. Let’s just say I showed up at his house and spent most of my time over there. Henry came with me, too. Big Eyes, was close to his age. They got along very well. Narcissus also had living on his property in little apartments two young adult stepchildren-- we’ll call them Mature and Immature. The mother of all three kids, we’ll call her Saint Ghost Wife, had died eleven years prior.
Initially there was more than a little joy. Big Eyes and Immature and Henry and I worked on decluttering the house. Funny thing-- Narcissus not only shared my father’s birthday, but also his hoarding disorder. The very first time I walked into his house, I noted immediately (how could I not?) a tiny living room full of couches, one of them propped inoperably upright, as this was the only way it fit. That guy had such an incredible collection of shit that one time, before I came along, his neighbors offered to build him a privacy fence so they wouldn’t have to look at all the decommissioned toilets and other crap filling the yard.
None of this phased me. In fact, I felt comfortable in the chaos. I’d grown up in a crowded house with not enough space, too many people, and mountains of useless salvaged broken furniture and items that had fallen off the truck. I acclimated quickly to my surroundings. Rather than be utterly creeped out that the falling apart house was a museum to my dead predecessor-- pictures of Saint Ghose Wife adorned the walls, her clothes still in the old dresser-- I put a fabulous spin on the story: Here I was with a man who clearly worshipped his partner. I was now his partner and so would benefit from his uxorious ways.
Eventually it was decided I would move in full time with Narcissus and rent out my own house. SXSW 2006, I rented it to a couple of metal bands from Chicago-- Deatholz and Baby Teeth, young men who’d met in a Christian high school. They were exceedingly polite, paid me a small fortune, left the house in better shape than they’d found it, asked only that I provide them the internet password and directions to the YMCA, and brought me a hostess gift-- yarn-- because one of them had a girlfriend who dug around online and discovered I was a passionate knitter.
After that I rented my house out to three separate tenants, tossing them together like a bad stew made of incongruous ingredients. One was a very serious Englishman. Another had big dogs, one of which killed the bird I’d left behind, and she never could pony up the rent. The third was a friend of a friend and I think she might’ve conceived her first baby in my old bedroom.
Over at Narcissus’s, there was precisely ZERO room for my stuff in the house proper. So I stored bins in the makeshift basement, which Narcissus had dug out in his younger days when he had some extra energy from his meth habit. That was the same thing that landed him in prison for awhile (the drugs not the basement), not his first trip to the Big House, which, all told, he’d been to twice before I ever met him. Wait, is it time to laugh at my idiocy some more? Go ahead. I’ll wait.
There was also no room for my son in the little house, so it came to pass that Narcissus was forced to clear out decades of shit from his Man Cave out back, in what had once been the garage. This was then converted into The Young Man Cave for my son, who-- though pissed off that once again I’d made him move-- seemed to adjust fairly quickly, likely as this bachelor pad setup gave him a lot of privacy, though ironically it had no plumbing, thus forcing him into the kitchen whenever he needed fresh bong water.
Though Big Eyes had once loved me so, her attitude toward me shifted wildly, swiftly, and mercilessly once I officially moved in, and she went from adoring me to hating my guts overnight. Now that nearly a decade has passed, can I see how, yeah, it might be a little freaky for your high school teacher to start sleeping with your dad? ABSOLUTELY. But here’s the weird thing-- and I’m not offering it as an excuse for my poor choices and bad behavior (because I came to behave very, very badly)-- for a little while at the very beginning we were all under this weird spell of something that did, momentarily, look and feel like happiness. Meals cooked and eaten together. The kids bringing their friends over. Lots and lots of laughter.
I’m sure if you asked Big Eye, Immature, and Narcissus, they’d tell a totally different story, one that starts, middles, and ends with Spike is a crazy bitch and that was the real problem. But my theory of how and why things shook down as they did is this-- I found out that when Saint Ghost Wife died, Narcissus had told the kids (quite young at the time) not to grieve, to carry one, blah blah blah. And I think that when I first showed up, it was fun because it felt like a party. But then, I didn’t leave. I occupied the space their mother had, space I suspect that they had been holding, awaiting her return, engaged in constant Magical thinking. My arrival marked physical evidence that she really wasn’t coming back and I do believe this triggered in them a latent grief that became uncontrollably explosive. Meanwhile, living in a super chaotic house where there was no room for me, a house headed up by a narcissist, so mirrored my own fucked up childhood that I, too, fell prey to my own latent, shocking, and explosive grief.
In short we were, collectively, a MASSIVE CLUSTERFUCK OF UTTER INSANITY. Big Eyes “moved out”-- announcing if I was staying, she was going. She took some possessions and went over to stay long term at a friend’s. Henry grew distant. Immature grew shifty and mean, though that didn’t stop him from borrowing my car. Narcissus and I consulted some of the adults who helped us raise our kids to try to figure out what to do. And we decided there was something that would send a clear message and let the kids know we were serious and our relationship was real, and that we were going to be a family.
Which is to say that, yes, WE GOT MARRIED. And we did so not quite five months into dating which, compared to my first marriage, was a considerable amount of time. Of course this did nothing to calm the kids. Big Eyes showed up at the wedding, held in the neighbors’ yard, dressed in black, chain smoking, talking on her phone, surrounded by a contingent of equally sullen friends. I think Henry skipped the event altogether.
Our first morning together married, Narcissus and I weren’t even all the way awake when his phone rang. It was Big Eyes, calling him, demanding he bring her breakfast. It should be noted that she was calling him from Quack’s, where she was sitting with one of his credit cards in her pocket. Of course this was a loyalty test. Of course he got out of bed and went to her.
I should have left then. I actually did leave. But only for a few hours.
Imagine the months of hell that followed as I foolishly tried to make things work. Imagine incredible hell. Imagine Immature tearing down the fence in hopes my dogs would escape and get hit by cars. Imagine Big Eyes stealing my possessions. Imagine the smear campaign she started at the school where I still taught and she still attended. Imagine how the kids felt when an article came out about my new book, and the headline declared me their imminent stepmother. (Jeff, who’d written the story, had been really thoughtful in focusing on the book. But whoever wrote the headlines really fueled the fires of damnation.) Imagine Narcissus standing back, refusing to take a real stand and defend our marriage, immersing himself in endless Dos XX and Law & Order reruns while I grew increasingly distraught.
I have, thankfully, forgotten some of the worst of it. I have unfortunately, not forgotten it all. I remember Narcissus constantly comparing me to Saint Dead Wife, chastising me, telling me how much better she had always been, how she had never pushed him, how she had been so perfect, had just gone to work and brought home money to buy his drugs, and why did I have to be so pushy? I remember learning the hardest of ways that I had not married a man who was dedicated to his wife (me) but who could not let go of his dead wife.
In October 2006 we came home from a ACL taping and I found every potted plant I owned (many) smashed up and down the front sidewalk. Not just broken but obliterated. Henry pulled up with some friends as I was trying to clean the mess, hoping hard it had been made by some passing vandal, though we all knew better. One of Henry’s friends, helping, cut his hand. The boys went in to deal with the bleeding but quickly came back outside. Henry was chalk white and incredibly shaken, urging me inside.
There I found that someone-- Immature as it would turn out-- had methodically taken every single fragile item he could find that belonged to me (wedding gifts, my special coffee mug, the list went on) and ground it into a sandy glass and ceramic dust into the kitchen rug. It was terrifying. It was a crime. I was scared for my life. My PTSD went into high gear. I began having severe panic attacks. I nicknamed him The Rapist which, as you might guess, did nothing to de-escalate the situation. But I felt so violated by his actions-- not just the physical destruction but the clear message that I was not safe, and that he would destroy me-- that I could not think of a more fitting word.
I moved out of the Clarksville house. I could not yet move back into my own house as I had to give the tenants notice. I wound up taking just one dog-- worriedly leaving the two others at Narcissus’s-- and moving temporarily into an extended stay motel on Barton Springs Road. I went on anti-anxiety medication.
Thanksgiving that year, the sister of Saint Ghost Wife, who had once been so nice to me, and who had excitedly given her blessing for my marriage to her dead sister’s widower, took a stand. Let’s call her Cunt, since that’s about right. She threw a family dinner and informed Narcissus that I was not to attend. When Narcissus passed this information on to me the message-- YOU ARE NOT WANTED. WE HATE YOU.-- struck such a deep nerve in me, so echoed my childhood trauma, that I lost my shit. I called Cunt to confront her. Narcissus was MY husband now. How dare she do this? She made it clear that she was still his family and that I was not. She said her plan was to be happy that day and my presence would preclude that, to stay away.
Narcissus, as he had left me on the first full day of our marriage to go to buy his daughter a bagel, now abandoned me on Thanksgiving. I wanted to die. I do think, if I had not had my son to live for, I would’ve seriously considered killing myself that day. The hurt ran so deep. I felt so betrayed. And yet still, getting back to my intricate relationship with pain-- it would take another two months to make a true break, and years beyond that to find genuine healing.
Narcissus told me the story of buying his Clarksville house about ten million times, the same as he told me every other story of his life. You’d think I’d be able to recite it then, but much counseling has thankfully helped me to block out the repetitive blathering to which I had been endlessly subjected. Still, if the ghost of memory serves, I do believe he bought that place for $15,000 in the ‘70s. It was much smaller then-- he added an extension to Big Eyes’ room around the time I met him. And a few years prior to that, he and Mature, an architecture student, had put in an efficiency apartment on the back of the house, and a garage apartment in the backyard.
Even with all those additions, it is somewhat unbelievable that TCAD appraised the place in 2015 for $627,019, up from $439,887 in 2014, and up from $382,263 in 2010. Of the current value, $255,000 of that is for the lot, which I have no doubt is still covered in shitty old toilets. The square footage of the original house, built in 1925, looks to be 1424, but that can’t be right. Maybe I can go over and ask him. Oh wait NO FUCKING WAY AM I DOING THAT. Let’s just note that the main house is a falling down piece of shit. Taxes without exemptions are $11,515.28. However, as you might have surmised from the clue that Narcissus is addicted to Law & Order, he is an old codger, eighteen years my senior, and so gets the Old Folks Cap, putting his taxes as $8,267.44 annually, merely half of what he paid for the den of sin.
Far more interesting than his story is the Story of Clarksville. You can read the cleaned up version of the history of the neighborhood RIGHT HERE, where you’ll see a cheerful one-line nod to how, despite gentrification, the “spirit” of Clarksville lives on. Probably goes without saying but let me say, for the record, I CALL BULLSHIT ON CHEERFUL ACCOUNTS OF RACISM.
For a hopefully more accurate account, you can check out the Wikipedia Page About Clarksville, and yes, I know Wikipedia isn’t exactly the most accurate source in the world, but the article does come with legit footnotes.
In short, Clarksville was founded by freedman (read: FORMER SLAVE) Charles Clark in 1871. The streets were caliche. The settlement was then considered outside of Austin. Eventually The Man, aka Whitey, started eyeing the land, its proximity to downtown, and decided the black families had to go. They were forced out. I urge you to read the longer version at the above mentioned link.
Of course Anglos pushing out People of Color was nothing new-- witness: Displacement of Indigenous People that began when those religious nutjobs landed at Plymouth Rock. Austin is a wildly segregated city-- economically and racially (and yes, those two intertwine). If you want to read a bit about the segregation and how it has been legally sanctioned and purposefully shaped, here is A Texas Monthly Article on Segregation and here is An Academic Paper on the Topic.
I do want to say that, despite my personal traumatic history in Clarksville, and despite the shameful way it was stolen from the residents of the original Freedman Settlement, this area of Austin is worth a visit. You can see some really great historic houses. You can shake your head with disbelief at the ridiculous ‘70s tennis player ensembles the valet parkers at Jeffrey’s have to wear as they run to park the cars of the people destroying Austin as we once knew it, and you can take a moment, please, to think about how gentrification is not at all a new problem here, it’s just getting exponentially worse.
Toward that end, last year I put up A POST AT KEEPING AUSTIN AUSTIN about my best friend, Noska, and his fascination with Texas history. He has a lot to say about the current overdevelopment, and how not new overdevelopment is.
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