Maybe Texas is a “read” state

The nude, curvaceous form caught my eye as I walked through B. Dalton late last summer. Unsure that I saw what I thought and, if the ugly truth be known, hoped I'd seen on that dust jacket, I stopped, peered between two racks of history and travel books, and made a beeline for the nonfiction section. Within a few steps of the book -- at this point I was still oblivious to the title and author, of course -- I saw the line where the plastic legs joined the plastic pelvis and where the wasp-like waist joined hips to the smooth, unblemished chest of a Barbie doll. Feeling tricked and, yes, disappointed, I glanced at the author's name -- Sedaris -- didn't recognize it, made no effort to remember it, and resumed my search for the poetry section.

A couple of weeks later at a meeting of several TAMIU writing teachers, Kimber Palmer suggested that we all go to The Empire Theater in San Antonio in November to see a writer. She mentioned his name, but I only caught half of it.

“David who?” I asked as we sat around a table in a classroom in Bullock Hall.

“Sedaris,” she said. “He's been on NPR.”

“I don't get out of Laredo often enough for that to help me,” I said.

“Well, he's been on Letterman, too,” Kimber said.

I see Letterman occasionally, but the name still meant nothing.

She pulled a book from her briefcase and held it up. Barbie's golden curves.

“Ohhh,” I said. “That Sedaris.”

Kris Palmer drove the white van into the shade of the Border Patrol checkpoint north of Laredo. Allen Wiseman sat in the front passenger seat and Kimber -- Kris's sister -- behind Allen. I sat behind Kris, who eased up next to the uniformed man holding the leash clipped to a large German shepherd. The driver-side electric window started down, but before the van came to a complete stop, he glanced inside and waved us through. Kris moved past a semi on our right and gunned the van back onto IH35.

BP agents sort through vehicles and people the way I choose books in a bookstore. Some -- like the four of us in the Wisemans' nice white van -- required or deserved little close attention; we obviously appeared ordinary, uninteresting, predictable, and nonthreatening. Others with less conventional or suspect covers require closer examination -- Sedaris's book, for example, or my 1983 Honda with the rusted fenders and the “Defeat Bush in '04” sticker clinging wistfully to the hatchback. When I stop at the checkpoint, an officer always asks, “U.S. citizen?” and another circles around the back of the car with the dog before the first eventually releases me with, “Have a nice day.” Still other vehicles and their drivers demand close inspection: the dark, the anxious, the outcast, the wise ass. Little did I know that David Sedaris belonged to this last group.

A few miles north of the checkpoint Kimber offered to read aloud some of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim so that when we met Paty and Charlie Cantu, Destine and Allen Holmgreen, and Ellen Barker at The Liberty Bar before going to the theater, we'd have some idea who David Sedaris is and what he wrote. She read the first piece in the book, “Us and Them,” about Mr. Tomkey, Sedaris's childhood neighbor who didn't believe in television and whose wife and children were, as a result, certainly “ignorant and alone.” Then, I read “Hejira,” the story of Sedaris's father telling him, when David was 22, “to get out” of the house, not because he was a “failure” or “a drug addict” or “a sponge,” but, his mother explains, because he was gay. We grinned or chuckled softly at parts, and I wondered if seeing this guy read from his book would be worth the $33 we paid for our balcony seats.

On the south edge of San Antonio, Kris pointed toward the sky on her left. “Look at that,” she said, and we all craned our necks and peered in the direction of her finger.

I didn't see anything but blue sky. “What are we looking at?” I asked.

Allen, his green and gold wrap-around sunglasses covering each eye with the Green Bay Packers logo, leaned toward the windshield. “Wow,” he said.

I stared at the upper left corner of the glass, waited for whatever they were seeing to come into view, but still saw nothing. I leaned right and looked past Kris's shoulder. There, like the Batwing gradually descending over Gotham City to the Batcave, no doubt where Alfred was waiting for Bruce Wayne with a warm glass of milk, hung the strange, black, triangular shape of a Stealth bomber. Dubya had been re-elected only three days earlier, and now with a liberal, gay, American writer who lives in France visiting San Antonio, Lackland Air Force Base was apparently on full alert. I felt safer already.

We took the Josephine Street exit off 210 and stopped at the light. Across the street in front of us stood The Liberty Bar, an old restored home that leans so far right that I shuddered at the implications: Had Republicans met here to discuss local campaign strategy? Is this some right-wing architect's idea of a subliminal message? Are Freedom Fries served instead of French Fries? Kris pulled the van into the lot and parked under the trees near the dumpster. We climbed out and weaved around the other cars parked in the small lot. Near the entrance I nudged Kimber and pointed at a bumper sticker on the back of a brown Oldsmobile; it read, “‘Yee Hah' is not a foreign policy.” It seemed the Liberty Bar's lean was, after all, structural, not political.

After dinner Destine and Allen, Paty and Charlie, and Ellen and her friend Virginia agreed to meet us at the theater because we were all in separate vehicles. Kimber drove us downtown, inched past the Majestic, followed the snarl of traffic around the block, and pulled into a parking ramp where we found a spot on the second level. It was nearly 8:00; we took the elevator down to the street and hurried to The Empire a block and a half away.

In the lobby a gray-haired woman scanned our tickets and directed us to the entrance where a man in a white shirt and black slacks, vest and bow tie smiled and checked our seat numbers. “Past the bar,” he said as he pointed. “The elevator's on your right.” Allen, wearing black jeans and a brown sport coat, and then Kris in black slacks and a dark jacket smeared with bright reds, greens, and yellows on the back led us single file between the cologne and perfume drifting off the crowd at the bar and the back row of floor seats. I brought up the rear, wondering if the presence of a bar was a reflection of the type of San Antonians who typically attended these events or an indication that anesthesia would be needed to get through it. The mostly thirtysomething-and-up crowd laughed and talked as they stood in the aisles and between rows of seats on the main floor of the theater. We turned right, got on the waiting elevator, and rode past the mezzanine to the balcony.

When we stepped out, the height was dizzying. Far below us on the stage a white circle of light surrounded a plain wooden stool next to a brown podium. We moved to the steps leading down to Row BB -- two rows from the rail overhanging the mezzanine. Climbing down felt like a controlled fall, drawing nearer and nearer the rail and the staggering distance down to the unfortunate people below who would break my fall. I suddenly wished my eyes were at the level of my navel rather than at the top of my six-foot-one-inch body. While baring my 47-year-old midriff so I could see is a steep price for everyone else to pay, those two feet would reduce the teetering sensation I felt as I moved behind Row AA to my seat. I bent forward and then eased back into the narrow, unfolding chair.

A young blond woman in front of me sipped from a plastic glass and then set it on the flat wooden surface to which was attached the brass rail, the only thing -- aside from our own balance -- keeping us from eventually standing and plummeting (albeit well-dressed) onto the unsuspecting heads of the literati below. I sat between Kimber and Allen; we chatted and glanced at the elevator behind us, at our watches -- 8:10 p.m. -- and then at the stage. People continued to drift in and fill the seats around and below us. However, the seats to our left, the ones reserved for Paty, Charlie, Destine, and Allen, remained empty.

While we sat far above the floor seats, we seemed close to the stage because of the steepness of both the mezzanine and the balcony, which created a sense of intimacy despite the crowd of over 800 people who now filled the theater. We were so high that it felt like I was sitting on top of a ten-foot stepladder and peering down at a toy podium made for a GI Joe-sized literary figure on the floor a few feet from the base of the ladder.

When the house lights went down, a hush filled the theater; then, a whoop and a shout rose from the crowd that turned to raucous cheering, whistling, and clapping as David Sedaris, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to the elbows and a dark tie swinging from his collar, strode out from behind the left curtain and walked to the podium. Honestly, I hadn't known what to expect, but the crowd's reaction at the appearance of this slight writer reassured me about people's goodness and intelligence, things I had seriously questioned since waking up Wednesday morning to the news that Dubya had been reelected. Who in this red state, I wondered then, would be interested in a gay American living in France? I simply couldn't imagine Texans cheering this writer.

These people obviously had read and fallen in love with his work, but while I clapped, I was also stunned by their reaction, particularly since so many students at both LCC and TAMIU don't read and often don't do so with considerable pride. When I asked in class a few days ago, “Who read the assignment, Carlos Fuentes's ‘The Mirror of the Other'?” only four out of 18 students raised their hands, most hesitantly, some almost imperceptibly as they glanced around the room. One might have thought that I had asked, “Who farted?” so wary were those few students about admitting that they had, in fact, read this essay by the most respected Mexican writer working today. And now I sat in The Empire Theater while this audience of over eight hundred readers cheered David Sedaris.

He put a folder and a copy of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim on the podium, greeted us, and said that this was his first visit to San Antonio. Then he said he'd begin by reading “Baby Einstein” from his most recent book, and again, when he mentioned the title, a cheer went up as it does at a concert when the band plays the first few recognizable notes of a hit song. He took a drink of water from a glass setting on the stool and began to read.

I've been to readings before, even organized and participated in some at El Café del Barrio, B. Dalton, Espumas, and the El Cenizo Community Center. I've clapped politely, my mind occasionally wandering while someone droned on through a long, bad poem about love or death or dying love or -- at least once -- about loving death. But this was far different. In “Baby Einstein” Sedaris described events surrounding the birth of his niece Madelyn, but it was the twangy North Carolina voice of David's vulgar brother Paul -- Madelyn's father -- that made me laugh until my jaws ached. Paul's affection for his daughter was endearing, but his crudeness contrasted so dramatically with the typical behavior and speech of a new father that I couldn't help but shake my head, think of my younger brother, and laugh some more.

In a toy store Paul explains why he's buying Baby Einstein videos for his unborn daughter: “‘I don't care if it's a boy or a girl, but this little son of a bitch is going to have brains.” Six months into the pregnancy, Madelyn's mother and Paul still had not settled on a name, so “the contractors and carpenters [Paul] works with suggested names . . . , most of them inspired by the pending war or the image of America as a tarnished but still shining beacon. Liberty was popular, as was Glory, the slightly Italian-sounding Vendetta, and Kick Saddam's Ass, which, as my father pointed out, didn't leave much room for a middle name.” The man sitting behind me roared with laughter, and the woman before me giggled, her shoulders shaking; she set down her drink, but this time it slid and disappeared over the edge and into the mezzanine below. Sedaris sipped from the glass of water until the laughter that filled the theater died away. Then, he read another sentence or two, and the laughter broke out again. And while his reading was as good as any stand-up comedy I've heard in a long time, I also found that I liked and even cared for the people about whom he wrote, even his crude brother Paul. Near the end of the piece David and his father have a crazy conversation “about . . . a boy who'd been surgically separated from his secret interior twin [who] lived inside of him for seven years,” and Paul endears himself to us despite -- or because of -- what he crudely and lovingly says to the sleeping infant Madelyn: “‘That's just your uncle Faggot and your raggedy-assed granddaddy talking some of their old stupid bullshit.'”

Sedaris read another selection -- “Six to Eight Black Men” -- from the book and excerpts from his diary about “slave monkeys” working for Helping Hands and how he and his partner Hugh referred to a residence in Normandy as “The House on Poo Corner” because the owner had scattered pungent manure across his lawn. And despite the height, the distance, and the $33 tickets, we laughed the time away, and when I finally looked at my watch, it was 9:50. The seats next to us were still empty, and I feared that the others had been unable to find a parking spot or that by the time they had, they were simply too late. But I was wrong. Everyone had arrived, but some couldn't bring themselves to negotiate the steep steps to our seats in the lowered lights of the theater. Paty explained that the height petrified her and so Charlie stood with her as she sat on a trash container near the elevator, faced a nearby wall instead of the stage far below, and listened and laughed along with the rest of us. All of which reassured me that many Texans live in a “read” state and appreciate good writing and the art of high comedy.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)