Falling for Texas

A piece about my experience of life and love there.

Charlie and I meet one night at a ‘Black Crowes’ concert in Houston, and I’m thrown into an unstoppable engine of Americana that purrs nostalgia for the Saturday teatime telly of my childhood.

As with most 80’s British homes, mine had worshipped the altar of all-you-can-eat A-Team, Wonder Woman, Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazard…..and now, here I was, inside one of the sets.

Man….I now had a boyfriend with a ‘pick up truck’, like..…. how did that happen?

I pinch myself as Charlie takes me to diners where breakfast dishes have names like ‘Moons Over My-Hammy’.

Yes - people actually go out for breakfast over here. This is 1995 and back in the UK, dining out is still considered by most, an indulgence and certainly the preserve of a much later hour. You’d only really eat breakfast away from home if you were on holiday, had stayed over at your nan’s or were a long distance lorry driver out of Yorkies.

The waitresses - whose name badges reveal them to be ‘Mimi’, ‘Brittany’ or ‘Shanice’ - wear shades of lipstick I’m sure must be called ‘Cherry pie’. Their morello mouths contain the same crescent dings of white found on cartoon cherries, when light strikes their gloss. They lean in with spiral bound notepads to jot down orders with a perkiness unknown back home.

“They have to do it to make good tips”

Charlie explains. There’s an obligatory two or three minutes of, as I see it, unnecessary saccharine, dispensed with every meal.

“Hey! How’re you doing? So busy on the roads today, huh? I’m sure hopin’ that storm doesn’t make its way over from Fort Worth…”

Little Chef it ain’t. It’s a Betty Crocker fakery I’m not used to, probably akin to the way foreigners see the British tradition of small talk about the weather at bus stops. I offer my smile as confused token. It’s strange what passes for normal behaviour here, I muse, but in a country that stocks breakfast cereal containing pieces brighter than most of my wardrobe, hardly surprising.

General stereotypes of America aside, my preconceptions regarding Texans are chiefly based around two TV shows. One being ‘Dallas’ - in which the characters strut designer clothes as they discuss the ‘Oil Baron’s Ball’, striking deals and forbidden trysts. In the other, ‘The Beverley Hillbillies’, folk have a fondness for denim dungarees whilst a redneck granny obsesses over shooting possums.

The reality is a strange mix of both but with more fat people than in either.

I fall in love with the natural ease of Texas. It’s a state that knows it’s shit hot, proudly holding its own like a porn star in a urinal.

It’s self-assured, but manages to pull off this slight arrogance because of its open-hearted and genuinely friendly spirit. Later in life, I will visit places that try a little too hard, begging you to like them, which as with a person, is most unattractive. Texas is no such place. Skin tones chop and chunk like novelty fudge - from vanilla to liquorice, lingering a little longer on the coffees and caramels. The imposing buildings, lush greenery and sunshine that flicks between neon and haze all speak louder than any sales pitch. The ‘lone star state’ knows it does indeed stand alone, because in the past, it has done exactly that. Texas knows you’ll love it and the fact that it knows you know, is sexy AF.

Charlie has dark hair that sits somewhere between a moody quiff and the 90’s ‘curtains’ style, popular at the time. His skin is lightly tanned whilst his over-white teeth conform to the toothpaste ad grade the US is famous for. Ivy eyes climb inside my clothes every time we meet…….but best of all, is his accent!

His porch-swing southern drawl makes me feel as if I’m the female lead in an Elvis film. With my long black hair and green eyes, I decide I am ‘Marie’, his latest flame….

I step effortlessly into character as ‘English girl’ - would be mad not to cash in on the opportunities that ‘stranger in town’ affords me. I milk it for all it’s worth, taking pleasure in saying stuff I wouldn’t normally say - like ‘inclement’ - just to watch him tilt his head with affection. Words, and the crossed wires of their meanings quickly become a staple of our chit-chat. He points to his socks and offers;

“You guys call these thangs ‘stockings’, doncha?”

Um… no, we don’t.

My new beau speaks of cool sounding places - New Braunfells, Austin and Clear Lake. Everywhere sounds like a resort. It’s either ‘out by the water’ or ‘a college town’. It’s a world where marinas parade their yacht and speedboat wares as brazenly as open jewellery boxes brag their bling. Jade rivers scrawl and bleed through hot earth as melted crayons whilst sequinned skyscrapers hang glitteringly in the night as a drag queen’s discarded weekend wardrobe.

Charlie talks of coyotes, armadillos and water moccasins. Of malls, mailboxes, mom…….and marijuana. He tells me of having to regularly drink a weird substance called ‘liquid gold’ to mask his recreational drug use for the tests they routinely perform at his work.  He’s a chemical engineer at an oil plant. I find it odd that they demand this of their employees, but to him, it’s by the by. He knows no different, it’s a trade. They want the clean result, he wants his job, he pays some guy for this fluid that hides what he’s been up to, and everyone is happy, right? He seems not to care what ingesting this cocktail does to him.

We visit Mexican restaurants that crudely flash their kitsch credentials, drowning in a parody of themselves.

Cactus murals? - tick.

Sugar skulls on the wall? - tick.

Chilli string lights? - tick.

It becomes routine to clarify ‘vegetarian’ to perplexed chignon-wearing waitresses who proceed to drag their robust mamas from tight, bone-broth kitchens. They stand, awaiting further explanation, holding out arms like threatened, up-ended stag beetles. We nod, smile and speak slowly, appearing to understand each other, until the dish arrives and it’s clear they see ‘meat’ as meaning ‘red meat’. With every meal this becomes more of a running joke.

“Joolee……..”

Charlie explains. Damn, he even manages to make my common-as-muck name sound attractive.

“…….you godda understand, this is Texas, we don’t have vegetarians here. Hell - everyone eats chicken-fried steak.”

This claim is certainly backed up by the numerous signs pimping this popular local ‘delicacy’.

Misunderstandings aside, with Texas being so close to Mexico, the food is incredible. Bottle green salsas jostle with mounds of terracotta rice. Tortilla chips the colour of cornflowers fringe plates as merrily as festival bunting. Coriander - cilantro - is scattered readily as confetti, so dinner appears to sashay - a lumpy dancing girl with blue lace fans, batting frilly green eyelashes.

If the food is a fiesta, conversation is also a colourful carnival. Charlie has me giggling as he tells me his ex pronounced ‘Fajitas’ as ‘Fadge-itis’. We chuckle some more as we consider the possible implications of contracting such an unfortunate ailment, pointing at the array of bright sauces to illustrate our juvenile thoughts.

We are 21, so most of our stories hark back to teenage years. Strange, how within everyone, is a need to create a golden age before a golden age has barely had a chance to take root. There is something within humans that seeks to press the flimsiest of flowers. Relaying a potted history to another, offers a chance to refashion our story. We select memories - hand-picked as favourite chocolates - to strawberry crème our past as pink labyrinths of personal growth and triumph.

Lancashire yarns featuring magic mushrooms as told by the boys back home, are replaced by Tex-Mex tall tales involving swallowing tequila worms. Stories of driving stoned upon the moors are swapped for ‘woah…man’ stumblings in the desert.

Lightheartedness underpins the basis of this courtship. It’s the smart-casual of relationships. Not too stiff and awkward, nor too faded and lived in. We know we don’t have long together so we don’t waste time getting deep.

We have little in common other than a shameless pursuit of hedonism and an appreciation of novelty. For three months, we marvel at the rainbow wing we bring to each other’s Spring. Like a sparrow who has met a budgie, we embrace a flight path that has opened up as surreal portal with limited access.

Together, we cruise charm-bracelet highways that dangle their bright and brassy trinkets - car showrooms, Baskin Robbins, Walgreens, Wendys and tacky motels with cartoonish signs of jagged edged suns wearing dark shades.

Charlie takes me to such motels. They can only be described as functional, charmless boxes, devoid of personality, sealing in sterility and purpose as predictably as Tupperware houses a cheese and pickle sandwich. But because a boyfriend has never taken me to any accommodation other than his home, it feels like playing at grown-ups.  I have the urge to call myself ‘Mrs Smith’ and uphold the game, relishing the taste of mischief it brings to my lips, so devilishly.

We lounge in bed, smoking joints as he beguiles me with that voice. It clambers into my ears - a rambling rose of hickory smoke, diesel and leather. How it blooms - a blistering medley of all the rock bands I ever had pinned to my wall!

I house sit for a couple whilst they go out of town for the weekend, and decide to go full-on Mandy Winger (JR’s lingerie model mistress) from ‘Dallas’. I open the door glossy lipped in my La Senza babydoll nightie I bought in Leeds with my student loan, in a manner I’ve seen soap temptresses do so many times. He is my JR after all - I’m sure of this, because his job involves oil - and here I am living out my own Southfork fantasy in what presents as a ranch. There’s a pool, walk-in rain shower and massive king sized bed. And there I lie in it, in all my English rose mystery to him, our bodies vessels for the playful magic spun by our souls.

Our interactions rise and fall as song, always returning to the well-loved refrain “Do you have (insert random thing) in England/Texas?”

He gasps at the speed of my sentences. Wants me to rewind, slow down. The way I drop the ends from my words and skip vowels fascinates him. I’m British, but not the British he knows. I don’t speak like the Queen, the BBC or The Beatles.

And his world, Texas, captivates me. A gumbo of contradiction, where trailer parks and condos taunt mansions and country clubs. A place where someone is just as likely to own a gun as a bible. In fact, they probably own both.

The trial of OJ Simpson is all over the news.

I have no clue who the fella is.

Nor do I understand why all the young Hispanic girls are mourning the death of a pop star called ‘Selena’.

I’m staggered by the size of the fridges and that most rooms have ceiling fans or air con. I’m dazzled by the fact there are dozens of music stations for genres I didn’t even know existed. I find it hilarious that if I shake my rain stick, people shit themselves and think it’s an actual rattle snake.

There’s an old song that keeps playing on the ‘The Buzz’, our favourite college-rock radio station.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it”

I must return home soon and know it will be the end of mine….this, the most fun I ever had.

And knowing that, I don’t feel fine.