The UnTexan

AUSTIN: WE'RE NUMBER 12 (VIOLET BLUE, WHERE ARE YOU?)

Austin, Texas, is considered the center of the known universe, mostly by people who live here. It's not. It also indulges itself in fantasies of being both "liberal" (nobody seems to seriously ask themselves more liberal than what?) and "weird" (Austin now tries to market "weird" in a shop down at City Hall, but mass produced weirdness for sale at City Hall loses its weird-appeal). It's not. And it's not. Austin didn't even make the top 10 on the recent Forbes magazine list of the top U.S. cities to live in as a single person despite the fact that there seem to be lots of single people living here. Austin ranked Number 12 (tied with Minneapolis-St. Paul, whoopee!), several places behind Dallas-Fort Worth (#9) and just ahead of Houston (#14). Austin puts on airs about places like DFW and Houston. Meanwhile, the city is being stampeded by suburbs and condomized by condominiums.

I live in Austin but it is not the center of my universe. I am neither single nor ever planning to be; I am not planning to move anywhere. But I couldn't wait to read the Forbes list. I found San Francisco at the top of the heap. Actually, that was no surprise. I already knew San Francisco was at the top of the heap. Violet Blue told me.

Violet Blue is the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. I found it a curiously and unlikely undertaking for such a staid publication as Forbes to rank top cities for singles. And I would like to be able to say "unlikeliness" and "curiosity" were the reasons I took a look at the rankings, but they aren't. I took a look because Forbes took the even more unlikely step of having a sex columnist write the feature story about San Francisco's wonders. Her column is called "Violet Blue: Open Source Sex." I read it. I like it.

Violet is a sex educator, writer, editor and a bunch of other stuff (including "fetish model"), according to the biography at the bottom of her column. The titles of her books seem to say what they need to say: The Smart Girl's Guide to Porn; The Adventurous Couple's Guide to Strap-On Sex; The Smart Girl's Guide to the G-Spot; The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio (and another Ultimate Guide for Cunnilingus). Violet seems to figure if everybody's doing it, they might as well know what they are doing. And she goes after her subjects with a schoolmarm's bluntness and a good writer's sense of touch. Sometimes she is almost enough to make a straight old guy wish he could wake up singing, "I enjoy being a girl!"

The first Violet Blue column I read was: "Violet and the Dildo Factory." It concerned the search for -- and discovery of -- a better and healthier dildo (Violet says health is a big thing in San Francisco). I was not in the market for one. But it was the kind of column that would have made me go right out and buy one if I were a young woman who has put men in general into proper perspective (i.e. she has better things to do with her time, she's tired of 'It ain't love, but it ain't bad,' always finds healthy relationships -- and this would be a healthy relationship -- just out of reach), but doesn't want to give up the sex part.

"I also got to see the goop being poured into almost whimsically molded penis holes -- and I immensely enjoyed the champagne-like 'Pop!' each faux penis made upon extraction from its mold. Somewhere, almost certainly, every time this particular cork pops, an angel gets her wings."

What woman wouldn't want to order one after a paragraph like that?

Now, just imagine Violet Blue's column in your hometown newspaper (and the Chronicle is the hometown daily newspaper for San Francisco). Imagine these headlines: "Burning Man and safer sex -- Free your mind, but watch out for crabs;" "Madison Young: Bondage Model, Artist, Feminist -- Violet Blue finds out how much porn it took to fund a feminist art gallery;" "Hard Lessons in Local Pathology - What are the Bay Area's most common rectal objects? Violet Blue finds out;" "Conservative Sexual Fetishes: A hardcore guide -- New to right-wing kinks? Violet Blue explains them all."

And, finally, this one, which deserves a paragraph all by itself: "Lesbian Gangs: A National Threat? Bill O'Reilly's homoerotic fantasies go nuclear."

So what does Austin get when it comes to columns in the local newspapers? Well, let's say, it certainly isn't Violet Blue.

Austin has John Kelso at the American Statesman, a newspaper whose recent new design -- heavy on the pastels, even lighter on the news than it used to be, car ads leaking into the news columns -- has rendered it even more meaningless than it was before. Kelso is so chronically unfunny that he makes the late Lewis Grizzard seem like a comic genius. Which he wasn't. As Roy Blount Jr. once said: "Lewis Grizzard is to Southern humor what Stuckey's Pecan Logs are to Southern cuisine" -- or something pretty close to that. Let's just say that column by column, Kelso's archive has accumulated into a huge pile of those Stuckey's pecan logs. The locals claim to like him; I think they are simply stuck with him.

And over at the Austin Chronicle, the "alternative" newspaper, which sometimes seems to confuse unreadable density and teeny-weeny type with serious content, Austin has Louis Black. Famously pompous, he writes a column called "Page Two" in which he dazzles the locals with sentences like this one from his current column: "All of these are the 'you' that you are, and they are from where you come." I am not even sure the Reader's Guide to Hallmark Greeting Cards and a poster with a picture of a kitten on it could help anyone figure that one out. But then Black has the audacity to begin the very next sentence with the words, "Last week, I went on and on...." Last week! Black's "on-and-on" has been going on-and-on for some 479 columns now.

Maybe Austin is lucky it's not Number 1 in the Forbes ratings if somebody like these guys would have been writing about it. And maybe Austin is right where it belongs -- somewhere provincial, a bit lower than Dallas-Fort Worth and a bit higher than Houston.

San Francisco has Violet Blue and is Number 1. Austin is stuck with Kelso and Black and is Number 12. I guess it's just proof that if life gives you lemons they will probably rot in the drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator along with the celery and make you wonder where that smell is coming from. There is no need for a Violet Blue here. Austin simply isn't sexy enough to squeeze.

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A WORD OF CAUTION: I like Violet Blue so much I even read her blog. That is how I found out she did the Forbes article; it is also how I discovered that she did a smart girl's guide to porn piece for Oprah magazine. Violet's blog is not for the faint of heart or the puritanical, unenlightened, thin-skinned, easily offended, sexually uptight, homophobic, etc.  Violet's blog is called Tiny Nibbles. But remember. Anything goes. You have been warned.

DIRT NAP

"Where's grandma?"
"Taking a dirt nap."

                        The Urban Dictionary

When August 16 comes around, the words "dirt nap" appear to me like a message drifting into view from the inky black of one of those Magic 8-Balls. It's because August 16, 1977, is when Elvis Presley died. Or did he? That is the question that won't die. But I received a definitive answer. It came to me while I was eating lunch at a bookstore in Santa Fe.

Several guys would get together for lunch from time to time at my friend Nick's bookstore. We picked up lunch from Josie's (Josie's is gone, but the memory of it is a powerful thing). We ate the usual Norhtern New Mexico fare -- burritos, enchiladas, chile rellenos -- but it didn't really matter what we ordered because in New Mexico food is only an excuse to eat chile -- red chile, green chile, or both -- lots of chile. I often had the beef and bean burrito with green chile. It was a fat burrito awash in Josie's thicker than the average green chile sauce (with the flecks of ground beef). We got together at the bookstore because we were hungry for chile and we all liked to talk. So we ate. And we talked and talked. Sometimes the talk was smart and bookish; sometimes it rose to nowhere near that level. That day Elvis came up, the way things do when a bunch of guys are sitting around eating various things with red or green chile on them. We were laughing over the persistence of the Elvis-died-or-did-he question. This was years after August 16, 1977, but some people were still wondering (as some people still do). A woman was shopping for books (somehow Nick was successful at mixing business and customers and yacking guys and chile) but nobody was paying her much attention.

Then she turned around, book in hand, and said, "Elvis is taking a dirt nap." You never saw a bunch of chile-eating, bullshit-slinging, bookstore-freeloading guys go quiet so fast. It wasn't just that she said what she said; it was that she sounded like she knew what she was talking about. And it was the dead-end way she said "dirt nap" that did it. It turned out the woman was a tourist, a doctor from Memphis. She was working in the emergency room at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis on August 16, 1977. And she said Elvis was not a living legend when he arrived at the hospital. She saw Elvis, touched Elvis. And he was already stone cold dead. Nobody tried to resuscitate Elvis. That is how dead he was. The woman was a southerner and she had a southerner's gift for storytelling (southerners are born full of storytelling tricks other people from other places go to writing workshops to try to learn), which is no doubt why she repeated her opening line (with variations) for effect. "I can tell you for a fact that Elvis is taking a dirt nap," she said. Dirt nap. The end. No questions asked. Her story was as finished as Elvis. She bought her book and left the store.

None of us ever saw her or spoke to her again even though she left behind rental information for a house she owned in Key West. But the words "dirt nap" will always be linked to the death of Elvis for me. I don't miss Elvis. And I surprise myself by not particulalry missing New Mexico in the five years since I left. These days Texas sits on me like a dense flat slab and it is hard to see out from under it in any direction. But sometimes things rise into view in my inky slab of Texas dark and I miss the bookstore and the friends I found there. It is not that "dirt nap" simply brings Elvis to mind. It is that every August 16 those two words conjure up Elvis and the taste of chile and a bunch of guys sitting around in a Santa Fe bookstore eating lunch and talking about whatever came to mind. Dirt nap. The end of Elvis. But not necessarily the end.

George Jones knows what I mean.

"Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter/That looks like Elvis/I soaked the label off a Flintstone Jelly Bean jar/I cleared us off a place on that one little table that you left us/And pulled me up a big ole piece of floor.

"I pulled the head off Elvis/Filled Fred up to his pelvis/Yabba Dabba Doo, the King is gone/And so are you."

Elvis was buried with his mother. Some people are buried with a sense of humor. The grave below is in a cemetery in Gallup, NM.