All’s Farrah In Love

Whom did Farrah Fawcett really love? A court battle over an expensive Warhol turns on matters of the heart:

It was a Monday morning in mid-December at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the day of closing arguments in the matter of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v. Ryan O’Neal, and the show was just minutes from getting under way. Outside the courtroom, the players milled about. O’Neal was strolling down the courthouse hallway in a navy blazer, an open-collared light-blue shirt, and dark pants. Seventy-two years old and still impossibly youthful, with only a touch of graying hair, he wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and held a plastic water bottle, which he wiggled before him as if he were going for a birdie putt on the eighteenth green at Riviera. “God, I’m nervous,” he said.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,902 words)

Sinner in the Hands

A church with the features of a cult affects the town of Wells, Texas:

But as the number of church members crept upward, residents of the tiny town started to feel uneasy. The recent arrivals systematically visited other churches to accuse the congregations of spiritual bankruptcy. They roamed the streets listening to the elders’ sermons on headphones, and they were frequently confrontational. A few church members, including Ringnald, moved in across from Gertrude Hearne, an 84-year-old grandmother of ten. Almost every afternoon, as she sat in a tan recliner in her wood-paneled living room, watching Jimmy Swaggart, church members would drop by to read her the Bible or sing hymns. At the sight of the Pentecostal televangelist, they’d flick off her television and declare Swaggart a false prophet. Finally, she’d had enough. “When I asked them to stop, they told me I was going to die, and I said, ‘You are too.’ ”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jan 27, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,773 words)

The Other Side of the Story

The writer on an illicit affair she had with a teacher at the age of 14:

The real life symbolism would have been all too clear: as Trace Lehrer exited through the front door thirty minutes after he arrived, my mother having called sooner than expected, I stood on the threshold clothed and disappointed and feeling like an idiot. I was unintentionally still as virtuous as I had been at the top of the hour.

I couldn’t understand Trace Lehrer’s behavior, or lack thereof; he was explicit in words, but not in actions. We saw each other every day and remained in contact every moment we spent apart. More confusingly, we had replaced first names with pet names in our ceaseless conversations, which had begun to focus on fantasies and plans for our future. “How many kids will we have, baby?” Trace Lehrer had asked me one night before. “Will you come on hunting trips with me and our son?”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Dec 4, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,376 words)

The Things They Buried

Domingo Martinez, a 2013 National Book Award finalist, recalls Sunday luncheons with his family in South Texas eating pit-roasted barbacoa:

As soon as I was old enough, which in rural Brownsville was around fourteen, it was my job to get up before anyone else those mornings and drive to the barbacoa place for our ration. I was expected to have the food on the table before the rest of the family woke up. Dad would leave $20 on the dining room table the night before, and I would find my favorite mixtape and then zoom off about seven-thirty or so in my sister’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I looked forward to those Sunday mornings—the simple rush of freedom as I pulled away, that transcendental sense of liberation when you lock into fourth gear and hit 55 on a dirt road, as some ageless punk rock blares from the speakers. It should give you a sense of how malnourished the rest of my life was that this was magical to me, this drive to some nearby colonia where Dad knew someone who was making backyard barbacoa in a burst of free enterprise that may or may not have been legal, churning out tortillas in their garage on a tortilla-making machine (I don’t know what those are called). I took my job very seriously, though I didn’t really understand why. I just wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,385 words)

What Is Art?

An installation by Playboy riles residents in the small town of Marfa, Texas and has everyone wondering: Is it art or advertising?:

Dick DeGuerin, a subscriber to the Sentinel, was at home in Houston when he read the news. A week later, the lawyer was flying his Cessna back from a spa day with his daughter in Mexico and decided to stop in Marfa for a Jimmie Dale Gilmore concert. The bunny, which had gone up in a matter of days, was all anyone could talk about. Some people got a kick out of it: there was Bob Wright, the white-mustachioed owner of Marfa Realty, who had initially put Playboy in touch with six area landowners, and Ty Mitchell, a rakish cowboy who’d had a part in True Grit and helped persuade the Eppenauers to lease their land. (Though Sheri had twice rejected the lease, when Playboy allegedly tripled its first offering, to $20,000 for twelve months, she sought the permission of her preacher and the school principal before signing.) Some ropers and mechanics expressed excitement, and a few creative types, such as Marfa Film Festival director Robin Lambaria, thought it made a funny contrast to the town’s serious art scene.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 24, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,238 words)

‘The pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin.’

On Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and an oral history of the “outlaw country” movement that coalesced in Austin as a reaction to the polished “countrypolitan gloss” in Nashville, led by RCA executive Chet Atkins:

“Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.”

Author: John Spong
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 13, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,438 words)

Failure Is Not an Option

As head coach for women’s track and field at the University of Texas, Bev Kearney won six NCAA championships and coached athletes who later competed at the Olympics. An affair with a student forced her to resign and her legacy is being tarnished:

“She was a magnetic, inspiring presence, and not only because of her success in Austin. In a near-fatal car accident in 2002, Kearney had been paralyzed from the waist down, and yet she now walked with two canes, like a mountain climber in a blizzard. Added to her already impressive life story—she had risen from a poor and rootless childhood, overcoming countless obstacles—the accident made her a formidable role model and a universal symbol of perseverance. ‘Failure is not an option,’ she liked to say, and she was living proof of her own maxim.

“That is, until this past spring, when Kearney was nowhere to be found at the 2013 Texas Relays. She didn’t ride onto the track on her burnt-orange scooter. No Divine Divas or Gents of Distinction were honored by her Pursuit of Dreams Foundation. At the parties held that weekend, there was no sign of the woman who had inspired so many people. That’s because right after Christmas, to the shock of many in the world of track and field and beyond, UT and Kearney had bitterly parted ways.”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 3, 2013
Length: 52 minutes (13,126 words)

The Best Little Checkpoint in Texas

A visit to the Sierra Blanca checkpoint in Texas that has busted Willie Nelson, Snoop Lion, Fiona Apple, Nelly, Armie Hammer and many other travelers passing through with pot in their cars:

“Meanwhile, my fingerprints were recorded on an inkless electronic touch pad such as I’d never seen on a television cop show, and my picture was taken with one of those egg-shaped digital cameras that nobody would use but a government agency with no interest in flattering you. Then I sat there in handcuffs for hours while my prints and mug shot were circulated to cop databases around the nation. This is a worrisome process for anyone. Who among us can ever be sure we haven’t pissed off a government computer somewhere?

“The rationale for all this effort was later explained to me by Carry Huffman, the deputy chief patrol agent of the Big Bend sector. “Every pothead isn’t a bad guy,” he said. “But every bad guy is a pothead.” By detaining people for a couple of joints, the Border Patrol, which since 2003 has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, is able to investigate everything about them, and this can occasionally lead to catching some genuinely bad guys. Car thieves and fugitives and completely clueless big-time smugglers—not to mention terrorists—all can be snared in the follow-up to the canine alarm. Of course, that happens only rarely; nationally, the Border Patrol has caught just one so-called terrorist, a University of Houston student practicing paramilitary operations in the Big Bend. But it’s not backing off.”

Author: Al Reinert
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jul 30, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,383 words)

The Call of Battle

After serving two tours in Iraq and returning to civilian life in 2006, the writer decides to embed as a journalist in Afghanistan seven years later:

“We humped the three kilometers back to the school. It was early afternoon and there was plenty of light left, so we loaded our packs into two ANA trucks and began our march back to the compound for the night. By then the Afghans appeared to have all but lost interest in the mission, scattered around us, groups of them disappearing behind qalats, walls, and buildings, then reappearing in smaller numbers. As we pushed on through another open field, in a wedge formation, machine-gun fire opened up about a kilometer away from a small village to our three o’clock. It was followed immediately by mortar fire. The gun rounds were close, kicking up dirt and rock as we rushed for cover. I jumped into a hole with Ray just as several rounds snapped between us, cracking inches from my head. ‘Holy shit, Ray!’ I gasped.”

Author: Matt Cook
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jun 30, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,993 words)

The Guilty Man

Michael Morton, who spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife, takes the stand again, against the real killer:

“The jury regarded him with what appeared to be both sympathy and fascination. One of the many strange aspects of The State of Texas v. Mark Alan Norwood was that at no point during the eight-day trial would the jurors hear that Michael himself had previously been found guilty of the crime, or that he had spent nearly 25 years behind bars. Before the trial, state district judge Burt Carnes had granted a request from the prosecution to exclude testimony about Michael’s conviction. Because his exoneration had wiped his record clean, he no longer had a criminal history, and the prosecution argued that any mention of his wrongful conviction might unfairly prejudice the jury against its star witness. To the people in the courtroom who were familiar with Michael’s odyssey, however, it was a mind-bending omission.”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jun 7, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,667 words)