Chinaberry Sidewalks Read Free

seems to have been lost on the committee. Then again, in Texas, the immortalization of scoundrels had long been a profitable enterprise, a fact that no doubt weighed heavily in favor of the monument’s construction. Spending four hundred thousand Depression-era dollars on a six-hundred-foot phallus memorializing a pack of thieves literally took the old maxim that everything is bigger in Texas to new heights. My friend Dabbo claimed it looked like somebody giving God the finger.
    With the world’s tallest freestanding masonry structure looming in their backyard, civic-minded residents began voicing their disenchantment with the name Industrial Acres and in 1946 banded together to form Jacinto City. Within ten years Frank Sharp’s brainchild was wearing its post-boomtown complacency like a worn-out shoe.
    The water tower and rec-hall gym notwithstanding, the Jacinto City of my childhood was a one-story town. Scrub brush stood higher than most rooftops. Dwarfish middle-aged chinaberry trees towered like redwoods on the low-slung horizon. Whether in the whiteout of a high-noon summer sun or the cold gray raindrops of winter, life under these prairie skies had a settling-for-less quality that my parents found reassuring.
    In fairness, citizens of Jacinto City in the mid-fifties were, for the most part, solid working-class people. Homes were modestly respectable and well maintained. A splash of landscaping here and an add-on there indicated that a modicum of forward progress still existed in the housing project’s everyday cycles. Not so for the Crowell family. Among the more crippling side effects of my parents’ disentitlement was a dirt-poor sense of themselves that made them far better suited for the maintenance of property not their own—particularly my father, whose mathematical wizardry and carpentry skills emerged only when he was employed by a third party, preferably at below minimum wage. Underfunded, overwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.
    The house on Norvic Street was one of a thousand or so cookiecutter bungalows whose poor workmanship, lack of imagination, and cheap materials destined them for an early demise. Considering the six-thousand-dollar price tag, I’m as hard-pressed to imagine where my father came up with the down payment as how he managed the monthly mortgage.
    My parents’ little white dream house sat submissively on a forty-by-sixty-foot lot, the extent of its floor plan a living room, a kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom at the end of a six-foot hallway. No frills, no nonsense. Two parallel cement strips, twelve inches in width, led to the one-car garage at the back of the property.
    In the transition from Avenue P to Jacinto City, my father managed to wrangle himself a dull-red 1953 Studebaker President, the first in a long string of used-car disasters in which he was unable to align tires and driveway strips with any degree of accuracy. Within a year, the deep ruts that had formed along the edge of the cement made the trip from street to garage as bouncy as a Baja road race. In summer months, when grass grew tall between the strips, he was forced to shrug off wisecracking punks riding past on their bicycles, calling, “Hey, mister, your yard needs a haircut.” I hated them for taunting my father but had to agree our driveway looked like a giant green Mohawk.
    The garage stood in the back right-hand corner of the property and was sided with the most easily breakable shingles available in the late forties. Once neighborhood kids discovered the joy of smashing holes in it, the garage’s days were numbered. (I myself was Roy Rogers—holed up in an abandoned mining shack, surrounded by desperadoes and needing to get off a clean shot—when I plunked my first shingle.) Soon after the first few holes appeared at the eye level of a seven-year-old child, my parents threw in the towel. By the end of the