Real Austin: The Homeless and the Image of God

Real Austin

The Homeless and the Image of God

Annie Vocature Bullock

CASCADE Books - Eugene, Oregon

REAL AUSTIN

The Homeless and the Image of God

Copyright © 2012 Annie Vocature Bullock. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-097-6

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Bullock, Annie Vocature

Real Austin : the homeless and the image of God / Annie Vocature Bullock.

viii + 92 p. ; 23 cm.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-097-6

1. Homelessness—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Homeless persons—Biography. 3. Homeless persons—Religious life. I. Title.

BV4456 B76 2012

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Jennifer.

May her memory be eternal.

chapter one

Real Austin

According to local mythology, the now widespread phrase

Keep Austin Weird was coined by a man eating in an Austin-

based establishment in the wee hours of the morning some years ago. As it’s usually told, the man and his server chatted about the unfortunate demise of local color as chain stores and restaurants colonized the landscape. People should go out of their way to support local business, they concluded. And in Austin, the local culture is self-consciously hip, iconoclastic, even a bit subversive. In a word, it’s weird. It’s really weird and we’d like to keep it that way.

The slogan went on to become the trademark of the Austin Inde-pendent Business Alliance and a general rallying cry for the city. There’s no question that Keep Austin Weird is a commercial slogan in its own right. You can find it emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers, reminding you to shop local businesses: Thunderbird before a chain coffeehouse, Toy Joy ahead of a big box store, and local chain Thundercloud over a national chain sandwich shop. These choices are a point of civic pride.

Austin’s weirdness is more than commercial. It’s personal. Austin is a city that embraces eccentricity. There are appointed times and places for weirdness, like the array of people who turn out in costume each year for Eeyore’s Birthday Party. Other times, the weirdness overflows spontaneously, like that guy who rides his bike up and down Shoal Creek in nothing but a purple G-string. Austin relishes its unusual sights. We embrace the quirks of our neighbors, even if that means a two-story yard flamingo built entirely out of scrap metal. Like junk, graffiti holds a special place in Austin’s heart. Just this year, someone defaced South Austin’s best-loved graffito: the phrase I love you so much spray-painted on the wall of Jo’s, a South Congress coffeeshop, in elegant red cursive. The business owners, who do a brisk business in graffiti-themed T-shirts, carefully recreated it from photographs. Embracing local businesses is about preserving all of those local oddities that give our city character, but it’s also an expression of a more general hospitality. Austinites love their city and keeping Austin weird means making everyone welcome. This sense of welcome is so lively that Austin is the kind of place where oddball people blend in instead of standing out from the crowd.

I observe these things as a relative newcomer to Austin. I came here three years ago from Atlanta, where I had spent much of my adult life. In some ways Atlanta prepared me for Austin. Genuine Southerners also have a high level of tolerance for eccentricity. As my dear friend William, a confirmed bachelor in his eighties, puts it, We Southerners appreciate the grotesque. If I didn’t want to take his word for it, I could turn to William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. The South—even the New South—has a touch of the Gothic about it. And I certainly knew my share of odd people, particularly through our church. I sense the same appreciation for strange things in central Austin but with an important difference. While the motley collection of off-kilter people I accumulated in Atlanta seemed to be a recognizable aspect of Southern culture at large, central Austin relishes the weird as an island of playful subversion in the vast sea of conservatism that we call Texas.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve lived with my family in a central Austin neighborhood. Our street is an uneven mix of run-down houses, mostly rental properties, and a smattering of new construction. Infill projects are common, most often taking the form of enormous ultramodern duplexes. There’s a cavernous example up the street from us: an angular monstrosity with a lime green exterior. It is as bare inside as it is colorful outside. The bare white walls of the interior glare through sheets of plate glass windows. They erect an enormous Christmas tree every year, as if contractually obligated by all those windows. The rentals mostly house twentysomething hippies, alone or in packs, some of them keeping ducks or chickens. They are quiet neighbors for the most part. Through the windows of a yellow house, I can see a living room that has been outfitted with a hanging bike rack. Three or four bikes hang from the ceiling beside an old upright piano. It’s out of tune but someone sits and plays rags in the evenings sometimes. A little further up, there’s a vacant lot and a bus parked there. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone lives in it. At the other end of the street, there’s a yard full of Hula-Hoops. I saw a handwritten sign by the fence one day: We have your bike. Didn’t want it to get stolen. Just knock on the door. This is either an act of kindness or a ransom note. Either way, it’s a delight.

The neighbors we know best are the homeowners we pass on our evening walk. There’s a lonely man in his 70s who prays the rosary while he gardens. When we pass, he stops to introduce himself and tell us stories about cars he used to own and excellent games he once bowled. A few houses farther up, there’s a young family with a little boy our son’s age. They are friendly with Greg, who lives across the street. I’d hesitate to call his home a house. It’s more of an art project: wrought iron, glass, and plywood housing a hearth and a workshop. He can be found out and about on his homespun motorized bicycle. His gorgeous dog, She-Ra—he adds Princess of Power! when he introduces her—lounges majestically in front of the ramshackle building. She’s holding court nearly every time we pass.

Dory and John live next door to us in a house with bright red trim and a gator skull gracing the front flower bed. John is retired, and in good weather—which is most of the year in Austin—he can be found outside, often shirtless with a beard that reaches mid-chest. He mows lawns all up and down the street. Every week or so, he shows up at my door with something he baked, and he can be counted on to drop toys over the backyard fence for my kids. On holidays, their own kids visit and they play horseshoes in the side yard. John is proud not to own a car and even set up a No Parking sign in his driveway. Dory and John love Halloween above all else. We dropped in at Christmas this year with a plate of cookies and there behind the tree was a good-sized effigy of Jack Skellington, the character from Tim Burton’s movie The Nightmare Before Christmas.

In some ways, we’re the exception on this street. We aren’t wealthy enough to own a home in this area. We rent an unassuming gray duplex with a dead tree in the yard. We have two bedrooms and one bathroom for five human beings and a medium-sized dog. We aren’t hippies. None of us are in a band. We don’t have any chickens. Instead, we’re a churchgoing family with three young kids. On paper, we belong in the suburbs, the land of big lawns, safe streets, and good schools. What drew us to central Austin—and has kept us there so far—is a mix of idealism and practicality. We prefer shorter commutes so we can spend more time at home, and we chose our neighborhood for the elementary school, one of the best in Austin. Those are our ideals. The practical side is that we only own one car and that makes proximity to public transportation a necessity. We like knowing that we could manage to get the kids off to school and get ourselves to work or to the grocery store if we were without our car.

On the other side of the equation, the suburbs feel lifeless. Austin is ringed by planned communities with names like Circle C and Steiner Ranch, places with their own schools, restaurants, and spas. They may offer a feeling of safety but they also create a palpable sense of isolation. My suburban friends live in spaces that look like model homes—furniture matches, textiles coordinate. They are beautiful spaces but they require a tremendous sacrifice of time and energy to maintain. Keeping up appearances seems to go hand in hand with being Texan. The hair is done. The makeup is carefully in place. The image is perfect: a perfect wife, a perfect family, the perfect children, and a picture-perfect home. The cost in both mental and physical effort seems onerous, at least from the outside.

Central Austin is about throwing off those shackles. In that regard, living in Austin has been an unexpected blessing. I sit down to write, positioning myself between a plywood table we pulled out of someone’s trash and a bookcase I bought in a secondhand store with a sign over the door advertising, simply, Junk. Someone drew a line across one of our couch cushions with a ballpoint pen at some point, I’m not even sure when, and there are dishes in the sink. The carport is a graveyard for outgrown toys I’m planning to donate to Goodwill. There’s a bag or two of clothes out there as well as an extra stroller we never use. A couple times a week, I move all the dining room chairs into the driveway because I can’t figure out another way to keep my toddler from pushing them into the kitchen and using them to reach the counters. No one notices this, I’m sure. Certainly no one complains.

The practical reasons we chose this place remain. We are better off nearer to public transportation. We are comparatively close to work. My daughter loves her school dearly and breaks into the school song at random intervals. There’s no denying that Austin suits us. Austin could suit almost anyone with a heart open to it.

A Downtown Bus

In many ways I was ready for Austin, prepared by Southern eccentricity. But Austin also changed me. Of all my Austin experiences, nothing has affected me more deeply than riding the 1L/1M bus through downtown. We live in North Central Austin, so my commute takes me through the heart of the city. In the beginning, I boarded the 1L/1M on North Lamar. The route follows Guadalupe—pronounced Gwad-a-loop—in front of the University of Texas-Austin. The kids call this stretch The Drag—a row of shops, businesses, and bars serving the university area. The bus continues south toward downtown, taking a left at 11th, which is