Texas: The Gun-Toting Loner State

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

By the time we entered Texas, it was clear that Brown Jenkin’s air conditioner, barely adequate at the best of times, had gotten one taste of Dixie in August and packed itself off to freon heaven. Hoo boy! Just in time for, let’s see: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert…

Jack, Bobby, & Elvis Chasing Tail Together in Heaven

So we were well and truly cooked when we got to Dallas, our boiled brains quite incapable of dealing with traffic lights or onion rings or human communication. No matter, though. We didn’t come to Dallas to make friends (though we made a chum of the gas station attendant who spied our cooler of beer and was rewarded with a cold one). We came for one reason only: because in this city thirty-three years ago, a mail-order rifle put a bullet through America’s collective consciousness, not to mention the skull of a president and Harvard man.

There is a museum in Dealy Plaza devoted entirely to the Kennedy assassination, located, appropriately enough, on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Unfortunately, the museum is done with restraint and good taste. No blood-splattered death car a la Buford Pusser, no “interactive” rifles with telescopic sights, no black velvet paintings of Jack, Bobby, and Elvis chasing tail together in heaven. Kennedy was treated positively, but it was no hagiography, and the assassination itself was presented with realistic skepticism towards both the Warren Commission’s official explanation and the many theories of paranoids the world over. What a let down.

A Stroll On The Knoll

What visit to Dealy Plaza would be complete without a stroll on the knoll? The Grassy Knoll, that is, where, conspiratoid legend has it, Kennedy’s real killers were perched that fateful day (not to be confused with the Grassy Gnoll, who can attack with his trusty flail or claw/claw/bite for three attacks per round, hey-o, tip your waitress). Many fine books and videos were on sale there on the sidewalk, each one revealing the Real Truth, no doubt. We pretended to be Men In Black and lurked and skulked and made only 90-degree turns.

The years have taken their toll on the knoll. It was less grassy and a lot more stinky than we’d expected. In fact, the knoll reeked of urine. This was probably just the work of a wino lacking in historical awareness, but still I had this mental image of the Cigarette Smoking Man coming back to mark his territory.