record, ya know? So we began tunin’ him out.”
“Billy never was that happy,” another boy said. “He did a lot of bitchin’ about his old man, same as everybody else. Billy wanted to smoke grass and fool around, and his old man wouldn’t let him, and they had some pretty bad scenes. So he wasn’t gettin’ along at home and he wasn’t gettin’ along at school and after a while he wasn’t gettin’ along with us, either. He’d come down to get us and we’d be gone. The pigs were watching this neighborhood, so we’d just boogie off to the country in somebody’s car, and by the time Billy got here from Booker T., we’d be long gone, and he got to thinkin’ we were avoidin’ him.”
Just after school recessed for the summer, the Lawrence boy knocked on the door of Sheila Hines’s house on Twenty-sixth Street and told her he was feeling depressed. “I think I might just go and disappear for a while,” he said disconsolately.
“Where?” Sheila said.
“I don’t know. A different neighborhood or somethin’.”
“Why?” Sheila asked. “Do ya think we don’t want ya around?”
“I don’t know, but when I gotta think about something, I just go off by myself. I’ll be gone for a while, but I’ll be back.”
“Well, come on by when ya do!” Sheila said cheerfully. “We’re always glad to see ya, Billy.”
Horace James “Jimmy” Lawrence, a beefy forty-six-year-old mailroom worker for the Houston Post, rattled around the empty house on Thirty-first Street cursing cockroaches and missing his son. In morose moments, Jimmy seemed to himself the personification of the hillbilly song “Born to Lose.” His father had been a millionaire who, in Jimmy’s words, “mint hiss’f on wine, women and song,” and abandoned his children to orphans’ homes. As a young man, Jimmy married a beautiful and tortured woman who required steady injections of morphine; he was prevailed upon to stick up groceries and drugstores to meet her needs. In prison in 1947, he heard from his dissolute old father: “I don’t want a criminal in my home, so when you get out, don’t bother visiting.” The twenty-two months behind bars were traumatic: “I saw awful thangs. I saw homosexuals. I saw a man kilt; his head fell in my lap in the lunchroom. I had nightmar’s and I attempted suicide. Somebody give me a Bible in solitary, and I found the Lard. He changed my whole life. I got out, I worked hard, I got pardoned by the governor, and I married a fine, fine lady that give me two fine sons, Billy and my older son Jimmy. In 1965, she got cancer, and she was in such pain, I went into a chapel at the hospital and fell down on my knees and I said, ‘Lard, if it be Thy will, take her to You,’ and a few days later, He done took her to His side.”
Jimmy went back to the bungalow on Thirty-first Street, back to the flowered yard with its banana and mulberry trees and “the only pink magnolia in this whole community,” and concentrated on his boys. Young Jimmy passed into manhood and moved away,and Billy went to junior high school and made the football team. “He belonged to the church and he served as a acrolyte, similar to a altar boy,” Jimmy said proudly, “and he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.”
Sometimes Billy would join his father on the evening shift at the Post, earning twenty or twenty-five dollars mailing newspapers out of town, but mostly he went his way unsupervised while his father worked evenings. “That was the trouble, I guess,” Jimmy Lawrence said. “He begun hanging with a kid named Wayne Henley and a couple others I didn’t like. That Henley, he been in this house two, three times that I know of. One afternoon I went off and left my shop keys on the dresser, and when I come back, I could smell incense. Once before I’d caught Billy smoking marijuana and he’d turned on the air conditioner right quick to draw the fumes out, but this time I come right in on ’em, Billy and Henley
“Billy never was that happy,” another boy said. “He did a lot of bitchin’ about his old man, same as everybody else. Billy wanted to smoke grass and fool around, and his old man wouldn’t let him, and they had some pretty bad scenes. So he wasn’t gettin’ along at home and he wasn’t gettin’ along at school and after a while he wasn’t gettin’ along with us, either. He’d come down to get us and we’d be gone. The pigs were watching this neighborhood, so we’d just boogie off to the country in somebody’s car, and by the time Billy got here from Booker T., we’d be long gone, and he got to thinkin’ we were avoidin’ him.”
Just after school recessed for the summer, the Lawrence boy knocked on the door of Sheila Hines’s house on Twenty-sixth Street and told her he was feeling depressed. “I think I might just go and disappear for a while,” he said disconsolately.
“Where?” Sheila said.
“I don’t know. A different neighborhood or somethin’.”
“Why?” Sheila asked. “Do ya think we don’t want ya around?”
“I don’t know, but when I gotta think about something, I just go off by myself. I’ll be gone for a while, but I’ll be back.”
“Well, come on by when ya do!” Sheila said cheerfully. “We’re always glad to see ya, Billy.”
Horace James “Jimmy” Lawrence, a beefy forty-six-year-old mailroom worker for the Houston Post, rattled around the empty house on Thirty-first Street cursing cockroaches and missing his son. In morose moments, Jimmy seemed to himself the personification of the hillbilly song “Born to Lose.” His father had been a millionaire who, in Jimmy’s words, “mint hiss’f on wine, women and song,” and abandoned his children to orphans’ homes. As a young man, Jimmy married a beautiful and tortured woman who required steady injections of morphine; he was prevailed upon to stick up groceries and drugstores to meet her needs. In prison in 1947, he heard from his dissolute old father: “I don’t want a criminal in my home, so when you get out, don’t bother visiting.” The twenty-two months behind bars were traumatic: “I saw awful thangs. I saw homosexuals. I saw a man kilt; his head fell in my lap in the lunchroom. I had nightmar’s and I attempted suicide. Somebody give me a Bible in solitary, and I found the Lard. He changed my whole life. I got out, I worked hard, I got pardoned by the governor, and I married a fine, fine lady that give me two fine sons, Billy and my older son Jimmy. In 1965, she got cancer, and she was in such pain, I went into a chapel at the hospital and fell down on my knees and I said, ‘Lard, if it be Thy will, take her to You,’ and a few days later, He done took her to His side.”
Jimmy went back to the bungalow on Thirty-first Street, back to the flowered yard with its banana and mulberry trees and “the only pink magnolia in this whole community,” and concentrated on his boys. Young Jimmy passed into manhood and moved away,and Billy went to junior high school and made the football team. “He belonged to the church and he served as a acrolyte, similar to a altar boy,” Jimmy said proudly, “and he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.”
Sometimes Billy would join his father on the evening shift at the Post, earning twenty or twenty-five dollars mailing newspapers out of town, but mostly he went his way unsupervised while his father worked evenings. “That was the trouble, I guess,” Jimmy Lawrence said. “He begun hanging with a kid named Wayne Henley and a couple others I didn’t like. That Henley, he been in this house two, three times that I know of. One afternoon I went off and left my shop keys on the dresser, and when I come back, I could smell incense. Once before I’d caught Billy smoking marijuana and he’d turned on the air conditioner right quick to draw the fumes out, but this time I come right in on ’em, Billy and Henley
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