Del Valle Catfish

Life just sticks you with certain people for some reason. And it's beautiful. Me, maybe a little over -worked, -focused with best-man duties?, with Zach at his wedding's rehearsal dinner. His odd younger brother, throwing a west-side up below inexplicably.

This is the image that prompted this post. That's Zach's first born, Zion Tonderai Kemp, and my mom. I don't know why it brightens my heart so much to see that, but it does. I've yet to meet him but my heart already (inexplicably, again) feels so close to him.

Guess I have to go back a few years. Zach and I met at LBJ High School in Austin, Texas, in our sophomore year at that gang-infested place. It was a Science Academy magnet school, an experiment at forced integration (it's pretty interesting that it was even done); the best students from all over Austin applied, were selected and then bused to the Academy, which did offer great classes; my biology and math classes in freshman and sophomore year were harder than anything I did in college, and I majored in Biochemistry (although it was St. Edward's University - focused on educating its students' "hearts and minds" - did it beautifully though: intellectualism was not the focus, a good heart was). So all these affluent, academically focused, privileged students were shipped into a war zone in northeast Austin. First of all, in Austin (though this is changing now some downtown), Interstate Highway 35, which cuts just on the east side of downtown, cuts the town's heart, too. West, affluent; east, poor. It was our train tracks. My family grew up just east of IH35 in a beautiful, stand-alone home on 1.5 acres with a 500-year-old live oak tree anchoring the property, which bordered, from 30 feet up, Boggy Creek, unchannelized, as wild as urban nature gets; the property on the other side was basically a park. So, it was a charming home. Thank you mom and dad. But that's a different story.

-- non sequitur --

I was in downtown Berkeley tonight, walking my bike from the YMCA after having sprinted some at the Berkeley High School track with girls soccer all over the football field and the track team on the track. I nice atmosphere in the bright lights on the clean, green field. Was walking my bike up toward Shattuck, the main thoroughfare for Cal's area of Berkeley, and then down it some south, and came upon this dude singing Barry White's "Can't Get Enough of Your Love Baby" into a mic connected to a mini-amplifier. He had black mittens on, slumped slightly in his seat; a black hood hugged his head, a straw cowboy sat on top of the hood. There was a handicapped cane (the kind that fits around your forearm) leaning on his left thigh, and he was staring straight forward at a slightly declined angle. The charm was his nonchalant, deep, into-it voice (mixing with the track experience), and probably more so his demeanor. It was a 50-ish black dude sitting on a bench at a dark intersection singing above the song's instrumental, playing several beats slower than the original, thumping from a small stereo. I pushed the front brake on my bike and sat on the cross-bar for a stunning few moments as he sang the chorus over and over for about 5 minutes (I don't think he bothered, thankfully, with Barry's talking parts of the song.). "My darling I, can't get enough of your love, baby. Oh no, baby. I don't, I don't know why, I can't get enough of your love baby. Oh umhmm ... " If you've tasted even a little bit of love that song sings in your heart, and mixed with that moment - Exquisite.



-- --

So kids from all over the city (we had graduates from my class go to Harvard, Duke, Yale, etc.) were sent to this northeast Austin ghetto. It was not equivocally the ghetto. It was the ghetto. Many of the houses that lined the streets across from the school and trailed away from it in several directions were bordered up (what were generally called "crack houses"). So, there was an extreme dichotomy/segregation: Science Academy upstairs in the triangle-shaped, prison-like building (which took about a year to figure out how to navigate) that was LBJ. By integration there was segregation. Hard to know if it was worth it for the school district. Maybe so?

And my first two years were legitimately scary for me. The principal, or someone, was incompetent, because there were a handful of serious Bloods and Crips at the school. Only a handful, but they flavored the whole place. I played basketball, so I mixed between the groups a lot. Often, I was one of two white people in the whole gym; a life-altering trip, seriously. The American black experience is a different culture, and I didn't get it then, though I understood it and liked it to a certain degree. So, I would walk through the halls and every now and then a much-stronger guy would put his arm around my shoulder and lead me into a locker well and tell me to empty my pockets and give him any money I had. I know in the scheme of things, that's no big deal, but there was a sincere helplessness, fear because the guy was strong, had an edge, etc. Probably a good experience to have in the long run, but definitely put you on edge. It happened to several of my friends, too. And I saw two guns pulled my sophomore year.

One gang fight I witnessed in school was between a Blood and a Crip. I happened to go to the bathroom during class and down the hall noticed this guy, who didn't look like a student, in a blue hat peering through the thin slice of vertical window that stood off-center on the upper half of the building's classroom doors. When class let out, I was walking behind him, noticed his tall lanky, body, out-of-sorts being and the blue hat. All of a sudden he attacked the best player on the football team (who was a suspected Blood; and a cool guy, really; he ran track, too, and so did I, and his running the 400 meters was a beautiful thing: one of the most graceful, beautiful things I've witnessed) from behind with a Masterlock in his fist. And then it was on. People started jumping out from all over the place it seemed, and right there, there was a full-on gang fight. No guns though.

I heard a rumor that the Crip guy was retaliating for one of his gangmembers whose mom was severely beaten (can you imagine?) because a group of Bloods went looking for him and found only his mama.

-- non sequitur 2 --

This morning went on a walk, found the trash can with beads of ice on it. Surprising. Froze last night. Walked to the park that I described in A Paean to Youth post, San Pablo Park. It really is an ocean. The sun was just rising to my right, the east, cresting that major inland ridge (must have a name - find it out) and slanting its light across the park. Walking, seeing my breath, hands in pockets, a chilly post-winter-solstice morning, cozy in its own way and crisp, easy to appreciate. As I was walking north along the east end of the park past the tennis courts where couples play pick-up ghetto tennis the way you play pick-up basketball (On Saturday mornings there's a line of dudes with doubles partners waiting outside the fence watching the action, waiting for their shot on the court. Winner stays on. Pretty cool. There's an urban vibe to it. Guys you would never think of as tennis players (their look) playing. And it's intense. Must say, that competition is fun, good.). North past the tennis courts the park expands for about four-fifths more; other than a bathroom building and several basketball courts tucked on the east end, the rest of the park is a sea of grass, a softball diamond at the far northeast corner. North and west it's all open ocean, and your soul smooths correspondingly with its expanse. All my walks and runs gravitate to the place, just like I described in the Paean post. Being such a wide, unbuilt expanse in the city, it presents the mountains on the near-horizon clearly; so there's that comfort of perspective. Anyhow, I was walking, passed a city worker ostensibly picking up trash, though really talking to a friend as they walked down the path, I saw guy in the distance just west of the bathrooms gazing west across the expanse of frozen grass, the slanting, fresh early-morning light flooding, a couple of early seagulls picking at the underlying slogged soil completing the forlorn at-sea image. Shortish, huddled in a flannel jacket, he had a seaman's air and was leaning into his stare that appeared to just glaze the grass, passing, appropriately, over the seagulls, as it shot northwest, as a shipwrecked sailor's might, (as he scans) scanning the horizon for any slight sliver of land. As I walked by, I said, "What are you looking at?" And was disappointed by his answer; I really expected him to say, "I'm looking for land." He said, "I'm looking for my twin brother; he should be coming any second." Huddled in his jacket was an open can of beer, completing the lost-at-sea, seaman impression. Stunning.

-- --

Anyhow, I first met Zach in the locker room at LBJ early one morning; we both played basketball, and the team had to meet at 6 a.m. in the preseason to do conditioning. My best friend at the time and I made an offhand, not-that-funny joke and Zach laughed at it from that morning, until that afternoon, when we met back in the locker room again for basketball practice. Odd. That's the anecdote I used in my speech at his wedding. "You know, if you know Zach, you know his odd sense of humor ..."

Our friendship was at first by default. My best friend decided to switch schools for cultural reasons. I understand. He wanted to have the drink beer, frat experience, and he did. I remember the day he said he was transferring. We were sitting on the wide expanse of smooth concrete that surrounds the diving board on the banks of the Barton Springs Pool. In the bright sunshine he said he was going. We had been best friends (though culturally different) since 5th grade. A beautiful relationship. We went through puberty, tried to lose our virginity to the same girl (not at the same time :) ; and, he failed) and basically talked and shared everything. It was cool. I don't think that happens so much (maybe so). We became friends because he taught me an important life lesson in a 5th-grade classroom. I was kind-of a jerk, not very socially adept (still not maybe), and kind-of haughty. I was pulling all of my friends ears one by one, just bullying them in a way. Not hurting them, but just being a jerk. I pulled Brian's ear and he said if I did it again he'd hit me. I did it again, and he hit me. Thank you. We fought, and from then on, I not only respected him, but I was thankful for that push back. Every person needs some and I hadn't had it until then. We hung out almost everyday after school - playing basketball, pick-up tackle football in the neighbor's yard and homerun derby in the street.

When Brian left in our Junior year, things changed. There's nothing like a wingman. We had some good times. We barely talked after he moved. And I haven't talked with him in years. At some point, I'll call him.

Zach and I had a different relationship. It was one of those experiences in life that enter from the backdoor and you only begin to recognize it's there after it has sat in your house a while and then you find it standing at the base of your stairs one day as it looks at you as if to say, "What's up? I'm here." I had a heavy (seemed to have an especially intense magnetic relationship with the earth) Volvo 740 (thank you again Mom and Dad) to drive the 14 miles (since it was magnet) to and from school and somehow started giving Zach a ride home from basketball practice everyday. He lived, kind-of, on the way home. So, everyday I'd procrastinate at his house for an hour or two when I dropped him off; I think sometimes of that time I "wasted." Would've been good to actually do something productive (or with more focus, but w/e), but home, for its own disappointing reasons, was never that comfortable of a place to be. We played homerun derby in his back yard, drank kool-aid, ate frozen orange juice and went down to the creek that, like my house, bordered his.

Zach moved to Austin in our Sophomore year from Del Valle, a country-ish suburb, east of Austin. I always think of catfish when I think of Del Valle; that's because, maybe, one of its most notorious characters in that era was a guy named Steve who played for the Del Valle basketball team. His skin was the flat grey color of a channel catfish and he had this inexplicable (there it is again), thin stache. A big, awkward catfish. (Interestingly, we became friends when we both played basketball at St. Edward's University. Up close in College he was just as crazy as he appeared from afar in high school.). As being from the country, and having a touch of the Steve-oddness, Brian and I dubbed Zach "Del Valle." And he joined our loose, more-or-less crew, as "Del Valle." There was "K-Man," "B-Man," and some others (forgetting the names, surprisingly). Brian and he always didn't get along, weirdly. Toward the end of our Sophomore year, they got in a fight; Zach kicked Brian in the stomach while wearing baseball spikes. Wasn't there, because I chose to run track that year, but its reputation, understandably, was character-less.

So, that action flavored things a little, but once Brian left, it was different, obviously. Sometimes Zach and I would go creekbusting - something I would do for hours everyday after elementary school in Boggy Creek. Creekbusting is where you basically "bust a creek" ha!. Since Zach was from Del Valle, he had the country bug bad; mine was more of a romantic's view (unfortunately) of the outdoors (born from my Germanophile father; he had the complete works of Marx in German on one of our family's bookshelves - studied in Germany and Austria). But anyhow, we came together, geared up and planned different bust routes. I slowly figured out that what Zach meant by creekbust was to find interesting spots to fish; I was about exploring, like some dude in Africa or the Amazon on some mega-transect adventure - seeing what was out there. So, that was a unifying aspect of our relationship. In the summer's between college we would always hook up to go on some creekbusts to different creeks around Austin. The best experience, surprisingly, was of the creek by his house, a minor branch of Walnut Creek. (Note: I recently did an ~18-mile creekbust of Barton Creek in Austin, from the overpass at Highway 71, all the way to downtown. Not all fun, but some very interesting segments. Unified that picture of West Austin in my mind. Barton Creek golf course was stunning, and there are some amazing sheer, limestone cliff-top (200 feet high or more above Barton Creek) homes.).
More to come ...