hell isn’t just for children

For some reason, I’m hearing Elizabeth Hurley as Mrs. Kensington, saying, “you have to understand, in Britain in the Sixties you could be a sex symbol and still have bad teeth.” So curl up, children, and I’ll assert this: my own misspent youth was also a different time. In Amarillo in the Eighties, even Caprock students could throw eggs.

In the fall of 2005, our unFair City has just lurched through another Hell Week. Kids from Amarillo High and Tascosa spent all of last week egging and paintballing the holy living crap out of each other. At the same time, the goodwill fostered throughout the city by Mayor Debra McCartt’s omnipresence at Charity Runs, Musician-infested Fundraisers, and Nothing But Noodles also lurches to a crashing end as the city finally faces the long-threatened lawsuit advocating single-member districts.

In the fall of 1985, me and my friend and some kid named Billy climbed into a huge red Impala and headed over to the west side of town. We were Caprock kids and used to being blamed for everything. Just a few years before, John McKissack had run a muckraking story on Channel Seven about low-riders at Bowie Junior High. John thought low-riders were gangsters; we knew low-riders were cars and were only a little afraid of the cholos McKissack was actually fretting about. We knew they were semi-violent potheads, but by junior year they had mostly dropped out of school, and usually left people like us alone anyway. We were new-wavish preppie wanna-bes and tended to hang out in places where we encountered super-violent cokeheads from Amarillo High and Tascosa. In short, our Hell often came from Polos, not cholos.

So when the Amarillo High-Tascosa rivalry week rolled around, we saw the opportunity to raise some Hell of the sort that would get blamed on our natural enemies. Who can resist that? So we piled into my friend’s Impala and drove over to Amarillo High. A school dance was taking place and the parking lot was filled with Mazda RX-7’s, B-mers, and the odd Mercedes. Billy hopped out of the car while it was still in motion; he had seen a new ‘vette that belonged to someone he kind of knew. He grabbed the egg, his arm pulled back, his mullet flapped in the autumn wind. . .

The thing about egging cars is that it seems so much less destructive than it actually is. An egg left on a car can destroy a new paint job. And, we found out, an egg thrown by an angry failed athlete named Billy can dent the door of a 1980s vintage Corvette pretty seriously. We hurried Billy back into the Impala and raced the Hell out of there, laughing in the knowledge that the whole thing would get blamed on some poor sap from Tascosa.

By junior year, we were already tired, tired as Hell of being stigmatized as east-siders. We fancied ourselves upwardly mobile and often ended up in social situations where people would talk about Caprock students as if we all carried knives and dime-bags to class. So when Billy’s egg dented some Amarillo High Corvette’s door; well, that was just things evening out.

It happens. Things Even Out. In a world where most people have either a four-year-old (“that’s not fair!”) or an Old Testament (“an eye for an eye!”) sense of justice, things will find a way to even out. And when AHS and THS students run around like Visigoths trashing each others’ neighborhoods, well, there will always be some CHS student tired of getting shat on, who'll take advantage of the opportunity.

In 2005, I live in Bivins, in Tascosa. And from the stories and sirens I’ve heard, it looks to me like most of this year's Hell Week violence was in Tascosa’s area. And since people don’t trash their own neighborhoods, I have to assume that Amarillo High does most of the trashing these days. At least, that’s what it looks like from here.

Of course, I’m probably wrong about that. If I lived in Amarillo High’s district, I’m sure I'd hear sirens during Hell Week and talk to neighbors who were similarly kept awake all night by amok teenagers. But this is what I’m not wrong about, and what the Amarillo Globe-Republican doesn’t understand: people don’t trash their own neighborhoods.

You’re a Republican, a racist, a regressive, a curious Texan, you’ll say I’m wrong. You’ll cite anecdotal evidence and crime statistics. You’ll point maybe to the Los Angeles riots of the first Bush administration. Of course, people trash their own neighborhoods, you’ll say. Bad people. Poor people. Black people. Mexicans. Caprock students.

And I’ll say: we didn’t. We were poor, and from Caprock, and pretty bad most of the time. But we didn’t trash our own neighborhood because we were smart and we knew it and we were going somewhere. We felt ownership in our own lives and when people stepped on us we stepped back.

But we only had three of the strikes I mentioned against us. Some people have more. Some people are elderly poor black Mexicans from the east-side who work sixty hours a week at Wal-Mart for minimum wage and they’re freaking tired and probably sick because they got no health care. Some people get stepped on everyday and have nothing to step back with. And that’s when they start fouling their own nest.

This has been a divided city for a long as anyone can remember, and nothing has changed so far. The Amarillo-Globe Republican Ghostly Voice says that the elderly poor black Mexicans should just vote. Well, I’m afraid that’s a cruel joke.

Because after you steal everything from someone, they own nothing. And if you’re the thief, you really shouldn’t complain if they show no pride of ownership. Even if your teeth are rotted to the core, you could have been a sex symbol once upon a time, according to Mrs. Kensington, who should know. And even poor, black, Hispanic, whatever Amarilloans ought to be enfranchised in this rotten city. Single-member districts might accomplish that. Nothing else has.

SPACEDARK