I, Piscivore
To unregenerate meat and chicken slobs like myself, seafood has always seemed as mysterious as Sanskrit and about as appetizing: Either it has no taste at all or it tastes as if it has been cavorting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remains of the Day
In the northeast corner of the Texas State Cemetery, in a plot far removed from the other graves, rest the remains of Antonio Briones, a Mexican immigrant who fought on the Union side during the Civil...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Game Over
The World of Perspiring Arts—to borrow from the masterful phrasemaker Blackie Sherrod—has lost its voice and maybe its soul. A mere fifty years after the golden age of sportswriting in Texas there is...
View Article30
THE RAILBIRDS AT THE STONELEIGH bar keep asking the man on the corner stool what retirement is like. “Like a steam bath,” Blackie Sherrod grumbles, copping a line from his final column in the Dallas...
View ArticleLeroy’s Revenge
Otis Crater was late for the fanciers’ organizational meeting at the Cherokee Lounge for good reason. He had just stabbed a U-Totem attendant following a discussion of the economic impact of a...
View ArticleSteam Spirit
MY WIFE, PHYLLIS, AND I HAVE A BASIC RULE ABOUT TRAVEL: Never get aboard a vehicle that you can’t get off and walk home, flights to Europe excepted. I have this recurring dream of being trapped in a...
View ArticleThe Devil and Mr. Jones
Following the stumbling and bumbling of the Dallas Cowboys this past summer, I began obsessing on Jerry Jones’s goofy grin. The grin is a Jones trademark and an enigma that has puzzled many an...
View ArticleWeed All About It
WHAT IS IT ABOUT MARIJUANA that makes politicians hallucinate? The faintest whiff of “the weed of madness” (as government propaganda used to call it) causes them to see distorted images of things that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ghost Writer
When I heard the rumor that the University of Texas regents were thinking of selling J. Frank Dobie’s storied Paisano Ranch to developers, I assumed that this was another example of the sort of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Case of the Persecuted Prosecutor
It was a scene suspended between a Kafka nightmare and the lunacy of Lewis Carroll, a bizarre conclusion to the long national tragedy that began with the raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in...
View ArticleThe Bingo King Is Dead. Long Live the Bingo King.
WHEN A GUNMAN WALKED INTO A DINKY SAN ANTONIO OFFICE last September and ended 53-year-old Eddie Garcia’s remarkable life, more than just a man died; so did the good ol’ amigo network that had run parts...
View ArticleThe Innocent and The Damned
An update from the author on Fran and Dan Keller appears at the end of this story. (March 2009) Most of the people in the small meeting room at Cicada Recovery Services in South Austin were...
View ArticleNothing To It
I WAS FLYING BLIND. NOTHING IN MY EXPERIENCE gave me a frame of reference for this journey. My son Mark was dying of acute leukemia, and the two of us were racing across the margins of the Chihuahuan...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tony Romo Is the Greatest Cowboys Quarterback Since…
What’s not to like about Tony Romo? He’s the most exciting Dallas Cowboys quarterback since Troy Aikman in his prime. He has Don Meredith’s devil-may-care charm, that same winning attitude where all...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Divine Secrets of the Alamo Sisterhood
Write it in red: Armageddon. Odessa. May 2004. No, not an al Qaeda attack or a Jerry Lewis Telethon. Something worse. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, that otherwise genteel, blue-haired...
View ArticleClik here to view.
You Aren’t Here
Across the street from the Alamo, on the very spot where Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis established his headquarters and wrote his famous letter pledging to fight until “victory or death,”...
View ArticleTelevision • Chuck Norris
FIVE YEARS AGO Bud Shrake and I got a call from our mutual agent asking if we’d be interested in writing a pilot for a CBS series about a modern-day Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris!...
View ArticleAsleeping Beauty
After 25 years in the driver’s seat of his Grammy award-winning honky-tonk band, Asleep at the Wheel, you’d think Ray Benson would be ready for a pit stop. Instead, the 44-year-old seems to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Consider the Oyster
THERE IS SOMETHING atavistic about the oyster, something that hides in the dark corners of our brains among lost baseball gloves and bottle-cap collections and unfinished love letters. I can’t remember...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writing Life
Pissing off the porch seemed like the perfect metaphor for his chosen profession until one night last January, when John Graves was heading outside to relieve himself and fell down the stairs. His...
View Article
