The Man With Candy Read Free Page A

downtown business section is sealed by freeways, choked with traffic and offered in sacrifice to the great god Commerce, including the alcoholic-beverage industry that supplies a noxious Skid Row. Until the power shortage brought its demise, a big lighted orange wafer bearing the word “Gulf” rotated over one of the tallest buildings, and a subtle petroleum scent completed a vague impression of a giant, ultramodern filling station.
    But atop one of these downtown buildings the visitor soon learns that there is more to Houston than meets the nose. In almost every direction, satellite groupings of clustered towers and spheres sprout from a broad emerald blanket of trees and bushes and golf-green lawns. The effect is as though one were standing at the center of a fairy ring of cities, each with its own stylistic personality, ranging from the blockily functional Lyndon B. Johnson Spacecraft Center to the southeast to the glaring white façades of the huge grain elevators to the northwest, and every edifice looking in the fresh rain as though a clean-up team had just finished its work. There is every conceivable type of design, from the outhouse simplicity of the old rural South to soaring minarets and fluted granite columns and gold-leafed domes, and still the young architects and engineers stream toward Houston, sniffling money and challenge, as fast as they can finish college. Several hundred of them labor at a single project: a $1.5 billion plan by a huge corporation to transform thirty-two blocks along Main Street into “a city in the sky,” with parking for forty thousand cars, a shopping center with parks and fountains and arcades high above the city, and sealed tubes to transport people like blow darts, rapidly and painlessly and screaming all the way, encased in plastic carriers.
    At night, Houstonians descend from their spectacular office buildings and villages to mansions with Neo-Gothic arches and Grecian pillars, to condominiums with mansard and gambrel roof lines and Potemkin fronts. But mostly they flee to tract houses, tens of thousands of them fabricated of ticky-tacky and cinder block and huddled together like the green houses of Monopoly, providing protection from rain and sun while their mortgagors wriggle in upward mobility, like spermatozoa. After 6 P.M., the swarming downtown section becomes deserted, a struck set, peopled only by merchant seamen seeking the action, bored security guards and a few promenading blacks looking in store windows.
    Until the power shortage imposed national limitations, Houstonremained stubbornly incandescent; the fossil fuels that created the city’s wealth were treated as though inexhaustible. Even at three and four in the morning, luxurious landscapes in rich sections like River Oaks were flooded by spotlights of many colors, improving on nature, and name plates and address numbers were splashed with yellow rays from hooded gas jets that were never extinguished. Long necklaces of soft blue mercury lights reached for miles along major streets like Main and Travis and Milam, twinkling southward toward the Warwick Hotel, with its glass outdoor elevator, down past the green-neon-tipped Shamrock Hilton, and even farther south to the shallow parabolic curve of the Astrodome, Houston’s pride, a $32 million stadium where men play games in air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, rainless, sunless, breezeless comfort.
    Houston, like Cairo, Egypt, lies athwart the thirtieth parallel, farther south than Casablanca, Baghdad, Algiers, more southerly than any part of Spain or Portugal, Italy or Greece. “Try to remember, Bill,” a visitor wrote in 1885, “hell and houston both begin with a h.” The city is an open sauna, relieved now and then by punishing thunderstorms and showers, and in summer by the odd hurricane. There are more air conditioners per capita than in any city in the world; even the public transportation is refrigerated. Houston boasts a “no-sweat set,” affluent