I don’t think Reggie was an anti-Semite, he was just asking questions. Reggie was a musician who did some time “for cocaine” and was on parole and working in the bakery-deli-meat market section of the Randall’s on Lake Austin Boulevard when he decided to ask my dad why in all the time he was in the penitentiary, he never met any Jews. “Is this because y’all look out for each other? Jewish judge, jewish lawyer – you’re gonna help each other, …
“Ann Richards is a lesbian!” The words were shouted at my mom by a frat boy in the bed of a pick-up truck in downtown Austin and it’s still one of the most bizarre and hilarious things I can remember. It was sometime in 1990, when Ann Richards was running for governor against central casting Texas rancher manchild Clayton Williams. My mom and brother and I were walking back from an event downtown (a political rally or the Pecan Street Festival? …
Ann Richards wasn’t a lesbian, and Beto isn’t a senator (yet) Read More »
In a dusty boomtown on the plains, not far from the train depot and a dry river bed, an old friend hid in plain sight. On that morning in Tel Aviv I strolled into a used book store near my work and out of only a handful of English books, the greatest of them all was on sale for 20 shekels. It’d been about 20 years since I’d first read ‘Lonesome Dove’, and almost 30 years since the TV miniseries aired, …
“The Talmud of Texas” – revisiting ‘Lonesome Dove’ 20 years later Read More »
The following article was the result of several months of research and investigation in Huntsville, Houston, the Texas State Archives in Austin, and in a series of boxes of family keepsakes held by my aunts. The full article can be read here Eusebio Martinez was polite — even happy — as he entered the death chamber that August night in Huntsville in 1960. He may not have understood his time was up. A few years earlier, Martinez had been convicted of …
My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates Read More »
It was at a shitty pizza place in south Austin that I first realized sports dreams come true sometimes. I was 17 that afternoon in 1996, sitting at Double Dave’s on South Lamar with my best friend and his cousin, watching the unranked Longhorns beat #3 Nebraska in the first-ever Big XII championship. The 8-4 Horns were three touchdown underdogs against a Nebraska team that was undefeated in the peak of the Tom Osborne era, when they were every bit what …
Few pilgrimage sites have seen more Israeli politicians and journalists over the past year than a two room African migrant bar on Rosh Pina street next to the Neve Shaanan pedestrian walkway in south Tel Aviv. They come in groups on guided tours, and as they stand in the first room, the guide will point to the doors leading to the second room – aged, solid wood, with two large Stars of David set at eye level. The message is clear …