11 July 2010
2000 miles to Texas
It was not even a week ago that I hopped on a plane, flying out of one of the northernmost areas in the US, Maine, and landing in one of the most southern, Texas. The differences between these two places were as vast as the 2000 miles between. During my weekend in Maine, we had blue skies and cool breezes while we looked at the dark blue ocean lined by coasts with tall evergreens and old wooden homes. The people drove their SmartCars and hybrid eco-friendly vehicles, the gay couples intermixed with the straights, and the population was largely white.
When I stepped out of the Houston airport to meet my friend, Danielle, I was hit by a wall of heat & humidity. It reminded me of the weather in South East Asia. Houston was about as hot as Cambodia in July. As Danielle drove us back to her house, we shared the highway with Suburbans and large pick-up trucks. The terrain was flat, the landscape mainly concrete with palm trees interspersed. People riding in the cars near us were every race and ethnicity imaginable and many were wearing their cowboy hats. I had officially arrived in Texas.
Danielle and Andrew live in a wealthy area of Houston called West University as it borders on Rice University. This is where the people with oil money have built their mansions. Live oak trees create a canopy over the streets in this neighborhood where many of the homes look like southern plantation and each yard is perfectly manicured.
Later that afternoon we visited my new apartment, which I had not yet seen in person. My neighborhood, Montrose, is quite different than Danielle’s. It is known to be the gay and eclectic neighborhood, plentiful with bars, cafes, and funky antique shops. My apartment is a two-bedroom on the first floor of a beige brick building built sometime in the 1940s. The lot next door is empty and someone had dumped an old mattress and couch on the roadside of the lot. Apparently you can dump your trash on anyone’s property in Houston for later garbage pick up, according to Danielle. Across the street from me were some newly constructed condo buildings that were modern and attractive. As I said, it’s eclectic, but I was excited about my quaint new apartment.
The following day was consumed with orientation business…I walked through the maze of hospitals in the Medical Center to get ID badges, fill out paperwork, and get health clearance. Even though Houston is a very large city, in fact the second largest to Los Angeles, all of the hospitals are concentrated in one area. The Medical Center neighborhood is filled with the likes of MD Anderson, Baylor College, UT-Houston Hermann Memorial, Texas Children’s, St Luke’s Episcopal, LBJ and Ben Taub (both county hospitals), Methodist Hospital, and the DeBakey VA. Walking through this area feels like being in the middle of downtown New York with skyscrapers and busy intersections & sidewalks.
Throughout the day I had been getting phone calls from my moving company. The driver told me that he was already in Houston, and that he felt like he was in a swimming pool with all of the sweating he had been doing. “It very hot here!” he said in his Slavic accent. I got finished work, picked up over a thousand dollars in cash to pay them, and headed to the apartment. When I pulled up, parked outside my apartment was a ridiculously long truck that seemed to take up half of the block. It had not one but two trailers on it. I finally met Ingus and his helper who were from Latvia and just about as stereotypically Eastern European looking as you could imagine. They were both tall, solid and meaty men. Ingus clearly spoke more English than the other guy who was wearing a neon colored cycling cap. They had to take a break in their air-conditioned truck before they were ready to start lifting.
I guess in one week I had already forgotten how much junk I had. I felt baffled as the apartment slowly was filled with stacks of cardboard boxes. The Latvian guys were sweating within minutes. Ingus asked if we could turn on the AC window units. “No electricity yet! Sorry” I said. It wasn’t long before even I was sweating quite heavily just from walking around the apartment.
As the men were unpacking, I noticed a short middle-aged man walking in the front yard, he looked in at the apartment and proceeded to move a garbage can from the roadside back to the side of the apartment. I figured this must be my upstairs neighbor. A few minutes later, the same man came to the front door and introduced himself. It was Larry, my new landlord. He was a small guy about my height but at least 10 lbs lighter. He had a salt and pepper short beard, smelled of BO, and spoke with a South African accent. He told me that he had been in Houston since the 1970s and was a retired “master plumber” and thus assured me I should at least have running water. He lives just a few blocks away in Montrose and doesn’t own a car, he only “peddles” around town. He seemed like a nice guy but his eyes conveyed that slightly distant look that I have only seen in people with psychiatric disorders, past drug use, or perhaps one too many biking accidents. I can now say that I don’t think I have every had a truly normal landlord…from the pot-smoking Bill Nuckles in college, to the slumlords in Lindenwold, the Guidos in Hoboken, and my last landlord in CT who told me he watched me when I ran around town.
Two hours later, the unpacking was finally winding down. Ingus started making conversation with me, he wondered how I had ended up in Houston. I told him my story and how I was starting over in a new place. He had already deduced that I was a doctor from the many boxes labeled, “Medical Books.” He said, “Ugh, I could never live in Texas! Too hot! Terrible!” He told me that the two of them would be leaving in the morning to do more packing and moving in Kansas, Colorado, Nevada, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Francisco before heading back to New York. Even though they had a job of hard labor, I can imagine that they must have met some interesting people and seen most of the US during the 7 years they’d done this. Once they finally left, I was thrilled to go back to Danielle and Andrew’s air-conditioned home and I think that I too, smelled of BO by then.
