What It Means to Live in Houston

This is Bayou Diaries, a column by Bryan Washington on his life and history in diverse, expansive Houston.

A few months back, at this book signing, someone asked me what Houston “means.” They thought I would know. And I don’t (no one does). But I’d gotten the question a handful of times already, and it always came from folks who hadn’t spent much time in Texas (they’d just moved down from Brooklyn, Philly, London, wherever). I usually passed it off with a joke or a smirk or a deadpan “tacos”—only, this time, apropos of nothing, I remembered something. So I told them a story:

As a kid, I lived in this suburb on the city’s western end. Most of my neighbors were white. Some of them weren’t. A Cuban family lived three or four houses down. I’d spend whole days with their daughter, and also this Filipino boy who lived across the way. Fuck knows how we found each other. Our families weren’t rolling in money by any stretch, so we didn’t have cash for video games or movies, and there wasn’t ever anything to do in our patch of the city. The daughter had repurposed this doll house from her mother. It had two floors. A backyard. You opened the thing up like a book. Most afternoons, the three of us crowded around it, grasping these busted dolls. We colored in their skin with markers until none of them looked alike.

Sometimes, we just had the one house. Sometimes, the house became an apartment complex. The complex became a mall, which became an airport, which became a multi-tiered trauma hospital or the business capital of an international city. Sometimes, everyone slept in the same room. Sometimes, there were two families, and then twelve families, and then none. Everything was casual. The couples were casual. The families were casual. If there were logistics, we didn’t worry about them, because we were creating a simulacrum of a city—an ideal city—although of course we wouldn’t have called it that.

Eventually, my friends moved away. I got new neighbors. New interests. The usual kid shit. But I kept some of the dolls. It took me a minute to lose them, despite everything. And I still think of them, intermittently, in the way you think of a thing you did one time that deeply changed you.

When I finished that story, the person at the book thing looked at me for a long time. Then they squinted. You could’ve just told me it was a stupid question, they said, laughing.

And I am not a very serious person, but for once, I didn’t laugh. Because I was serious. This was serious. We blinked at each other, and we went our separate ways.

*

Describing what any place means to you is a little anomalous—it’s also pretty fucking ambitious. On one hand, your hometown is simply a point on the map. A set of coordinates. But the thing about that point is that it can reflect your worldview, your interests. Your access. Your privilege, or lack thereof. And, sometimes, the fruits a city can yield are clean-cut: There are some places in the States that are only only accessible to folks with means. There are others whose status is a little more tenuous, less obviously codified.

And then there are cities like Houston, whose multitudes eliminate the walls of that dichotomy altogether. There’s no zoning to speak of. Everything is all over the place. The city’s culture is changing in real time, and less out of any perceivable internal identity crisis than a struggle for non-residents to assign to the region a form-fitting identity.

Because your Houston could be the Indian restaurant on Westheimer where, when you ask the waitress about a dish, she says it reminds her of caldo de res, and you know exactly what she means. And your Houston could be the spa at your gym, where a pair of elderly couples—one Mexican and another Korean—laugh at some untranslatable joke until they’re nearly choking, splashing at the edges, beckoning you to join them. Or your Houston could be the St. Thomas students smoking pot on the lawn by the Menil Collection. Or the Astros Stadium in the off-season. Or the outdoor ice-skating rink at Discovery Green, at the end of winter, with people spouting every conceivable language at once as they fall all over the place, busting their asses, skating for free.

Your Houston could be all of that. Or maybe none of those things. That’s the point. In a city made up of many cities, spread out, like tiny countries, ascribing their influence on your outlook is a lot like trekking through a tiny country of your own, only to look back and prod every interaction with a shopkeeper, or a bar, or a diner, wondering how each variable contributed to the whole. An unwieldy, chunky endeavor.

Still, though. I thought I’d try.

*

First, I ask a few buddies. There’s no rhyme or reason to my friend group—everyone’s from everywhere. We all like to laugh. But one guy, a lanky Latino dude, frowns when I ask if he likes it here. He asks why he wouldn’t like it, what the fuck is wrong with Houston. When I ask him what the city means to him, he just gives me a look, like, Really?

Another friend, a black junior high teacher, glances up from her phone and gives me a grin. She asks if this is for my column, if I’m going to write about her, and when I tell her that it’s certainly possible she laughs and says she’ll get back to me.

One answer is, I think, gratitude. I think that’s what Houston means to me right now. 

And then, another buddy, a Vietnamese dude, nods when I finish with my question. We’re drinking beer on the roof of this pizzeria. The waiter’s hovering with our check. My friend says he’s never really thought about living in Houston. What he actually wants to do is leave.

But everything’s right here, he says. Like, it fits? So it’d be hard. I don’t know. I don’t have to worry about my parents here. There are enough Vietnamese all over town. I can eat what I want, whenever I want. I think I’d miss it, you know?

I’d just end up wanting to come back, he says, tearing a slice of pizza. I think it’d be a waste of money.

*

At this clinic I go to, the lady drawing my blood tells me she’s from New Orleans. But she lives here now, she adds, cheesing. She’s been around since Katrina.

Before I can bug her about her life, she sticks me with another needle. I barely feel it go in, but I wince, because I am someone who winces. We’ve sat there for a while before I ask if she likes Houston, and she says she was tentative at first because she wasn’t sure if we had any good gumbo.

I had to bring my recipes, she says, wrapping my forearm. I just didn’t know. I brought my mama’s gumbo, and her mama’s, too. But I was surprised. Y’all surprised me. My mama moved down when I told her, and the babies, too. Y’all already had a lot going on here.

I can’t complain, she says. I’m still here.

*

At another book thing, a few weeks later, a white guy asks me about Houston’s influences, and I tell him they’re global. He tells me that doesn’t make sense.

I ask where he’s from, and he says, Manhattan.

But now I live in Brooklyn. I know a global city, he says. Trust me on that.

*

Another day, at one of the taquerías I pretend to write in, a black woman and her kid sit beside me, chewing at queso and nachos. Every now and again, the kid raises his hands, swaying. He sings Queen, and then Juan Gabriel, and then the Beatles. Eventually, some song about “amor” starts playing, and he screams the word alongside guitars: amor, amor, amor.

His mom doesn’t say anything, just watching him. When the taquería’s manager, a short guy, walks over, the pair fight over their last chip.

*

And then one night, up in Austin, I meet this guy at a gay bar, some ultra-gentrified dive steeped in bisexual lightning, and after the usual piddling around we end up inconceivably, inevitably, talking about Houston. The guy tells me he misses the city’s “chaos.” He’s a Mexican dude who cooks Thai food. In his hometown, this wouldn’t have been remarkable, but three hours upstate had turned him into an anomaly.

Eventually, we abandon the bar for an ice house, or what we’d have called an ice house back home. When you travel, you make concessions. I say as much to the guy, and he laughs. He says it’s close enough, and then he tells me his ice house story: he’d met the love of his life at one, a dude who ended up dumping him for one of his students.

I tell him my ice house story: I’d gotten kicked out of the same establishment twice—once after an argument with a boyfriend, and then again after laughing way too loud at a bartender. He was this white dude in a cowboy hat, and he’d been flirting with a customer, and he’d leapt from behind the counter, telling me to “get on.”

Me and this guy laugh about ice houses, at our faux-ice house in Austin. It’s shiny and overcrowded, with metal seats. The heat is entirely too dry. But our laughter feels a little sad, honestly. We’re laughing because we miss home.

*

One night, a friend and I bring a visiting white author to a spot out in Chinatown. My friend and I talk with the waiter, a Chinese dude, in Spanish, because his English isn’t fluent and neither of us speak any Mandarin, but we have Spanish, Houston’s lingua franca, in common.

Afterward, the white author looks at us skeptically. He asks if we knew what we looked like. We should’ve fucking seen ourselves, it was entirely bizarre.

The waiter brings our dishes: a whole fried fish, a spread of stir-fried pork, and mapo tofu. My friend laughs at the author, shaking his head, already chewing. He says he guy just isn’t from around here.

*

Eventually, my teacher friend messages me. She says that Houston is the American South, and the Dirty South, but it’s also the entire world.

*

One answer is, I think, gratitude. I think that’s what Houston means to me right now. And it’s entirely too sentimental a conclusion, too clean, too free of shards, but the thing is, you get to live here. It’s kind of a gift. It’s damaged and it’s fucked up in the way that every gift is. But it is a gift, nonetheless.

A few weekends back, I went out dancing in Montrose. I hit this club that I used to pass through back when I was figuring out that patch of the city. It’d been a while, but I’d just made a friend who wanted to check it out, and you couldn’t see shit by the barside, but the music was nice. So we danced.

Afterward, I watched him smoke outside, and it occurred to me that I wanted some tacos. Some women were walking behind us, going to or coming from work, chattering in Spanish. A Mediterranean restaurant sat a few blocks away, and we muttered vaguely about grabbing something to eat there, although we knew we wouldn’t—we’d just end up at Whataburger. A set of teens sprinted by the stop behind us, passing a guy sleeping on the bench, figuring out what the city meant to them on their own. The evening felt a lot like possibility. Like anything could’ve happened.

And maybe that’s what Houston feels like, in this moment, all the time. Which is, I think, my final answer. At least for the next little while.

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