From Gene’s Notebook

…in a local club, two women and eight men sit around a table, drinking a lot of beer, all college people, some with Greek fraternity letters on caps; they’re part of the academic world, or were very recently. Friends all.

Then, in come two scruffy men, and one woman; they draw stares from the ten, even some hard stares.

The two men are welders, working on a new rig at the port, those 80-90-hour work weeks; the woman, very white, very blonde, is with the taller and scruffier of the men. The men drink beer, she a Margarita; they speak an East Texas/Louisiana drawl - English. The 10 at the other table are speaking English and Spanish.

I’m in the middle.

The East Texans, strangers to the Lower Valley, ask more about The Wall and Brownsville. They don’t stare at the ten, and the ten’s stares are gone; all, three and ten, are into their beer, some nacho chips, tacos, the lone Margarita..

…am glad the ten’s stares didn’t translate into words/fists, …and the ten, their sports cars, pickups, cars …all drinking that gas that the welders helped make possible … are outside, ready for more night stops ….

A big big country is the US, and it is realistically too much to expect the East Texans to speak with the academics, and how would a table of ten East Texans on the edge of oil and gas and ‘gators and Cajun music and country music react if three student types speaking English and Spanish - some with Greek letter fraternity caps - came into a cafe way up on the Upper Gulf …?

Confession! Not a surprise! I prefer the oil-stained shirts of the welders to the fraternity caps …and so what does that mean? A sideline romantic, that’s me, a sideline romantic ….

But I’m not a welder, don’t have an East Texas blonde girlfriend and can’t knock down beers and smokes, and I’m also not a fraternity guy with a five-speed sports car …. Now, to that table in the middle ….

Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky,
Brownsville, Texas