Rebel Soul: Notes From a Texan Abroad

(originally published on The Back Word)

A picture taken when I met my father after eight years apart reeks with irony. He left Texas after my parents divorced, heading to Michigan and then New York City. He never returned until he paid us a weekend visit in the fall of 1970. My brother and I, aged 11 and 13, stand with him in a yard in Mission, Texas. Looking warily at the camera, standing far enough from my father to signal unease, I have my arms crossed over an orange University of Texas sweatshirt.

This is ironic because I learned, often and in rough terms, that my father hated Texas. Whether this dislike stemmed from the failed marriage, his dismay at Mission’s lack of urban sophistication, or most likely a combination of the two, he never missed a chance to knock the state. He was from St. Louis and suited to cities, my mother was from Del Rio and listened to the morning farm report on the radio. Beyond speaking English, they had nothing in common.

I saw my father a few more times, when my brother and I flew to New York to visit him and his wife. Despite escalating tension, I kept returning, lured by the bright lights and big city. He never accepted us for who we were, and instead tried to mold us into what he was and demanded we become. He started about 10 years too late, and squandered whatever goodwill we felt for him with constant attacks. The Texas we saw through our father’s eyes was a nasty place—conniving Southern Baptists intent on stealing our Jewish souls, crude mercantile behavior, no European-style culture, grubby people who couldn’t speak French. “That’s Texas thinking” was the second lowest insult possible, slightly higher than “you’re just like your mother.” He called us savages because we didn’t attend operas or symphonies! He warned, “Van, they’ll eat you alive at Princeton if you don’t know classical music.” (In fact, I discovered at Princeton that Monty Python mattered far more than Mozart.)

Texas became the symbol of the push-pull of my warring parents. The harder he tried to hammer me into being a prep-schooled, wine-sipping bon vivant in Brooks Brothers suits, the more passive-aggressively I attached to Texas. Other kids rebelled with long hair, drugs, and that damned hippie music, but I opted for a hard-edged appreciation of my Texas identity.

The mental process went like this: You don’t like Texas? That’s tough—check out my Sesquicentennial belt buckle, my beard, my taste for the twangiest mountain music and the border’s norteno sounds. To this day, a few months shy of my 48th birthday, I take intense pleasure when my father goes goggle-eyed at the Texas flag in my apartment and my faded Levi’s blue jeans. Confused youthful rebellion evolved and remained part of my adult identity. You don’t like the way I dress or act? I couldn’t say the following when I was 17, but I can easily say it at 47: That’s just too fucking bad.

Ultimately, I split the difference between Mom and Dad. In his own ham-handed way, my father profoundly influenced me. Those visits to New York opened me to post-high school options beyond my family’s traditional loyalty to the University of Texas. Like a character from a Larry McMurtry novel, I found a way out of the restless alienation I felt in small-town Texas. I did leave Texas for Princeton, moved to Brooklyn, got married, moved to Connecticut, got divorced, and never went back for more than a few days after 1977. At my 10th high school reunion, a friend reminded me, “Van, you said you were going to get the hell out of Texas.” And I did.

And I like aspects of the Northeast—the weather, New England, the career options, New York’s endless appeal to what I call my “action junkie” tendencies. But I’ve never viewed New York State or Connecticut as home. Buffalo? Syracuse? Waterbury? East Hartford? I have no childhood memories of the area, no rootedness beyond my young son and the walls of my apartment. That’s typical Wallach behavior. I’m just the latest in a paternal line of dream-chasing drifters; after all, my father, his father and I were born in three different countries, men blown like tumbleweeds across borders in pursuit of elusive fulfillment.

My late mother’s family, on the other hand, has modest dreams and happier lives. Her family has remained in Texas for seven generations, since my ancestors got the hell out of Germany in the 1860s. For proof, go to the Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, on Water Street, where you’ll see gravestones of people born as far back as the 1840s. I’m related to almost all of them.

As I’ve gotten older, my Texas identification moved beyond rebellion to become an intense, if physically distant, sense of who I am. That sense always existed in me, and friends and relatives always tried to stoke the flame of affection. Bill Austin, the late owner of the Upper Valley Progress in Mission, where I had been a teenage reporter, regularly sent me packages of clips from the McAllen Monitor, usually detailing political corruption in the Valley and the many dangers of Mexico. My mother sent me charming gifts such as a heavy brass armadillo, a crocheted armadillo, and a t-shirt with armadillos saying, “Homesick for Texas, send chili soon!” (Come to think of it, my mother had an intense affection for all things armadillo). So in terms of remaining attached to my roots, I am very much my mother’s son, perhaps more than when she was alive.

As the decades passed, I made peace with my father. We’ve lived within 50 miles of each other for almost 30 years. We talk and get together with my son so he can know his grandfather. I’m more outspoken when my father crosses me. We don’t talk about the past.

Being from Texas is a point of pride, an outsider’s badge in an area where practically nobody comes from the South. To identify myself as a Texan means to say, “I look at the world a little different from you. I’m not exactly like you, and I’m glad of that.” People take note of Texans while folks from, say, Ohio and Virginia are politely acknowledged, if that. Everybody’s got a Texas story, friends who moved there, a comment on the President, and saying I’m from Texas makes me the lightning rod for whatever opinions they care to spout.

Not that I’m a mindless booster or Texas-right-or-wrong type. After all, I live up here, not down there, and I’m not looking to relocate. The closest I ever came to that was when I tried to find a job in Austin in the late 1980s after I got married and my bride and I wanted to escape New York. I doubt I could ever emulate Larry McMurtry, who returned with riches and fame to open a bookstore in Archer City. Go back to Mission? No way, Jose!

Instead, I’ll build a virtual Texas through contacts with relatives and occasional visits. I’ll write essays like this that mine a deep vein of memory and conflicted emotion. I’ll cruise the websites of the McAllen Monitor, major papers, and the Texas Observer to keep up with the state’s kookiness. Of course, if I ever become McMurtry-like rich and famous, I might consider a Victorian mansion in Gonzales, the kind that looked so huge and splendid when I was a kid growing up in Texas.