Eight Feet Deep

Why I couldn’t see it coming Friday evening I just can’t imagine.

The night before taking a bus from here in Beaumont, Texas, to visit a friend in the Dallas area, I spent more than two hours searching for a taxi that might pick me up the next morning and deliver me to the bus station on time. I never found one that night.

On Saturday morning, about an hour before I was supposed to leave on the bus, I called a local taxi service on the first try and told them what time to pick me up. One hour and 10 minutes later the taxi still had not come. I called this taxi service back and the dispatcher said the driver was on his way but that gave me little solace as my bus was scheduled to leave in about 20 minutes. I finally said a few choice words and got into my truck, determined I would drive to my office parking lot downtown and walk the couple of blocks to the Greyhound station. I intercepted my taxi just as I was about to pull out onto the street.

Why not just drive my truck to the bus station and leave it for the few days I planned to be gone to Dallas? Why that sounds like a splendid idea to me. Unfortunately, the bus station won’t let customers leave their vehicles parked there. They will, in fact, have your vehicle towed off.

“There’s a lot of vandalism around here,” said the young bus station clerk, obviously wishing he would someday grow up to drive a mighty Greyhound. Hey, I got to have at least one ‘yuk’ in this sordid tale.

Well, I can certainly understand vandalism because the bus station is located in not the best of neighborhoods even though it is only a few blocks from the federal building, not to mention some of the city’s largest Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches. Hence my dilemma.

My bus was scheduled to return to Beaumont from Dallas via Houston at 8 p.m. Christmas evening. If I had my truck, I could have driven home and through the hairy neighborhood — near where I admittedly camped out in my truck during my desperate homeless days. But apparently Greyhound would rather have one person mugged and perhaps killed in a robbery for 25 cents instead of unsuccessfully filing a claim for a vandalized automobile. Pardon me. I know it’s Greyhound yet I don’t quite understand the logic.

One taxi on Saturday morning — albeit late — came through for me. The driver didn’t even charge me full fare because he was late and I was highly agitated. The same didn’t happen last night, Christmas 2007. No I wasn’t charged full fare. I wasn’t even overcharged. That is because I couldn’t GET A FREAKING TAXI!

After pulling out of Houston on the Greyhound for Beaumont, about 30 minutes late, I started dialing phone numbers I had stored from the previous Friday night when I could not get a taxi. And like Friday night, on Christmas night, a taxi was not to be found in Beaumont, Texas, or in all of Jefferson County for that matter. No room at the inn? It doesn’t matter. You’d have to ride a camel to get there!

Now I don’t live in a metropolis. But I do live in a metropolitan area. Which is defined as:

“The Federal Office of Management and Budget’s designation for the functional area surrounding and including a central city; has a minimum population of 50,000; is contained in the same county as the central city; and includes adjacent counties having at least 15 % of their residents working in the central city’s county.”

The Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan area is composed of Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties. It has a total population of about 385,000. It ranks 130th largest such population area in the country (Here’s looking at 129!) Beaumont is the largest city in this federally-designated area and the Census Bureau estimated its population in 2003 at 112,434. Jefferson County is the most populous of the three-county area with almost 245,000 residents. So much for geo-economics lesson. The gist of my useless knowledge here is that the area in which I live is not Mayberry with the city limits lying on either side of the population sign.

A search of Yahoo Local for taxis in Beaumont returns 12 businesses. Search “cab” you get 10. Go for broke, search “taxicab” and it yields 10. As is the case in all three categories, several entries are for the same company and several are out of business. You don’t fare, pardon the pun, much better in the phone directory which lists nine cab companies.

So the problem is that there are a lack of cab companies to serve the population. True. It is also true that the existing cab companies should have their people out doing something better with their lives than driving taxis, such as being a trial lawyer which this area has seemingly hundreds who are available to sue asbestos companies, the local refineries, big tobacco and drug manufacturers. Not that there is anything wrong with it.

I wrote a city official Friday night with my ire concerning an inability to find a taxi. It’s a good thing I wrote him Friday night and not last night when it took me 45 minutes to walk home through a rough neighborhood (and some good ones) from the bus station.

Officials in Beaumont and in Jefferson County for that matter all have their spirits up because of a new industrial boom taking place. This includes construction which will turn the local Motiva refinery in Port Arthur into the nation’s largest as well as the building of a huge liquified natural gas offloading facility for ships at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico on Sabine Pass. Don’t be looking for many hybrids running around here.

Along with this boom, Beaumont officials in particular want to make downtown — only a few blocks from the blighted area around the bus station — into a tourist Mecca anchored upon a big convention hotel along the Neches River.

The city official to whom I zinged off a missive wrote me back today and took a “build it and they will come” take on how to have good taxi service. Dean Conwell, the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau director, said the lack “of quality” cab service in Beaumont is due primarily to little demand.

“When we finally get better air service and a convention hotel downtown, I believe things will get better.”

Well, I suppose that is something to wish for in the new year and probably beyond. But in the meantime, what happens if someone who can’t get a taxi gets mugged and killed? Perhaps if they are tourists or business people from say Germany or Japan who came here to get hooked into our big, new growth it will get our city’s name on the news. Oh well, I didn’t say it would be GOOD news.

Oh, did I mention that the city’s bus system was closed on account of Christmas?

I don’t know what it takes to get a cab license in this city other than paying a fee. I don’t know if there are any standards for service, or lack thereof. But I will be looking into it. And if our city officials have a lick of sense they should be looking into it as well. Any city worth a spit needs a decent way for its citizens and its visitors to get around, see its sights, and spend their money. In Beaumont, we don’t have it and if people want this place to prosper they might get the big hotels out of their eyes and some taxicabs that actually operate out onto the streets.

My Christmas Eve morning started off with a phone call from my doctor at the VA. A call from your doctor never really portends a good omen. A phone call while you are asleep is usually not good one way or the other either, so I just let it ring and listened to the voice mail message from my doctor after I got out of bed before calling him back.

The news I received was not really unexpected. I had some routine tests done the other day which include a fecal occult test which — despite sounding like some kind of investigation method to detect devil worshipers — actually finds blood in one’s stools. Like I said, I expected it and mainly so because of the stress that the methadone I take for chronic severe pain puts upon my lower GI system. There are, of course, a number of reasons — most of which are rather ominous — why blood may show up in your feces. Among these reasons are colon cancer. While not worried, per se, at this time about cancer I nonetheless will go through the unpleasantness of a colonoscopy just as soon as the VA can schedule one for me.

After years of interaction with medical professionals this one has been more involved than normal and I would rather that not be similarly the case in 2008. But when one reaches more than five decades of life more and more visits to the doctors can be expected along with their poking and prodding you in the most creepy of manners and locations.

So all I can do now is sit back and hope for the best next year and try to tell myself things will get better. That’s not easy for a seemingly born pessimist like myself, but I don’t suppose you can go rolling skating in a buffalo herd. So to cheer me up and perhaps it will cheer you up as well, I offer one of my favorite Christmas stories, the David Sedaris piece Six to Eight Black Men which I first read in Esquire and later in his collection Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

Esquire played up the piece by touting the below teaser:

“A heartwarming tale of Christmas in a foreign land where, if you’ve been naughty, SAINT NICK and his friends give you an ass-whuppin’

Unlike our Santa, SAINT NICHOLAS is painfully thin, dresses like the pope, and tops off his robes with a tall hat resembling a tea cozy.

In addition to a great Christmas story, THE DUTCH have thrown in legalized drugs and prostitution. What’s not to love about that?”

If that doesn’t whet your appetite then I don’t know what will. Have a merry Christmas!

The ‘corner’s gen-u-wine My Name is Earl Christmas lights.

My life is a little like Earl’s in the wickedly-funny TV show My Name Is Earl. Actually Earl and I aren’t that much alike except for living in a motel although we have our share of weird characters here as is the case in Earl’s world. One of those characters is my next door neighbor here in the ‘corner’ who, even though he claims to be a redneck, is actually a nice guy who’d give you the shirt off of his back. So that is among the reasons I had no objection when he installed the bizarre Christmas lights the other day. His brother, who also lives in the motel, said they look like a real “White Trash Christmas.” And so they do. But if one lives in a situation such as this then that person must embrace the symbolism that accompanies such a life.

It’s almost enough to make one play Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. I say almost, but not nearly enough. It is funny that I have yet to hear that hideous song this Christmas season. The song seems to appear every Christmas much like a fruit cake from a favorite relative whose feelings you don’t want to hurt by telling them that fruit cakes really suck. However, I have no qualms about saying how much I hate that song. I can’t believe that it’s only been around less than 30 years, it seems like it has existed longer than time itself.

But if one likes their Christmas music to include, like their families and friends, a little dysfunction then they should find one of Robert Earl Keen’s albums which contain Merry Christmas From the Family.

Keen, the Texas troubadour and college buddy of Lyle Lovett’s at Texas A & M, touches most of the bases for a made-for-TV-disaster family Christmas gathering in his song, starting off of course with Mom and Dad getting drunk at the Christmas party.

You then have your familial ethnic tension:

“Little sister brought her new boyfriend
He was a Mexican
We didn’t know what to think of him until he sang
Felis Navidad, Felis Navidad.”

Next is the divorce-melded family:

“Brother Ken brought his kids with him
The three from his first wife Lynn
And the two identical twins from his second wife Mary Nell
Of course he brought his new wife Kay
Who talks all about AA.”

The merriment continues but faces danger should the booze and sanitary napkins run out:

“Carve the turkey turn the ball game on
Make Bloody Mary’s
Cause We All Want One!
Send somebody to the Stop ‘N Go
We need some celery and a can of fake snow
A bag of lemons and some Diet Sprites
A box of tampons, some Salem Lights
Haleluja, everybody say cheese
Merry Christmas from the Family.”

As for my own merry little Christmas I will be headed for the Dallas area tomorrow and return on Christmas Day. And to keep the theme of a White Trash Christmas going I will be traveling by bus. Yee Haa! It should be fun just as long no one throws up on me. Feliz Navidad, Ya’ll.

PS If any of the above links don’t work. I’m sorry but you’ll have to figure them out yourself if you want to look/listen that badly. Who do you think I am Santa Claus?

As if we don’t have enough to worry about down here in Texas, the nation’s sports media is all abuzz about the new “it” couple Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo and the ditzy Jessica Simpson.

It all started with the only person it could start with, Cowboys’ receiver Terrell Owens. That is because if it’s not about T.O., it will eventually be about T.O., who could easily be known as T.O. the Ego. What is wrong with that guy?

Owens shot his mouth off about Simpson being a detriment to Romo, whose team lost Sunday only their second game this season to the lackluster Philadelphia Eagles. Apparently Owens didn’t want his teammate to think Romo’s squeeze was the Cowboy’s Yoko, so he made some sort half no-apology.

Look, if I was young and rich like Romo, and was going out with a beautiful starlet who doesn’t seem to care that she isn’t the brightest bulb in the box, I think I would tell T.O. to just “shut the hell up!” But that’s why Tony gets the big bucks. Big surprise but in reality I just don’t give a damn Scarlett.

My local newspaper has a poll asking: The Dallas Cowboys’ Terrell Owens thinks quarterback Tony Romo’s girlfriend is distracting him.

What do YOU think?

Should Jessica Simpson make herself scarce during Cowboys games?
–Yes
–No
–Who cares

It appears after my voting four times now, the “Who cares” choice, my side leads 46 percent to 42.2 percent “yes” and 11.8 “no.: I can only say to that 54 percent voting out there: “Get a life.”

It seems a little late that people here in Beaumont, Texas, are beginning to notice that the firefighters might have a good reason for wanting enough staff on a truck. Firefighter Cody Schroeder is undergoing what is surely agonizing treatment for the burns he suffered Monday during a fire in which he and five other of his fire department members were injured. The 27-year-old Schroeder suffered burns to 40 percent of his body when a structure blaze flashed over.

Continuing difficulties in negotiations between the city of Beaumont and the firefighters’ union has included demands that fire trucks be staffed with four suppression personnel. Such goals aren’t really pie-in-the-sky wishes by greedy union men. Numerous studies have prompted fire safety associations for years to call for minimum engine staffing standards. The “fire staffing” debate was one of the big issues when I worked as a firefighter more than 20 years ago. Cities whose politicians rightly worry about trivial matters such as taxes often feel like having enough firefighters or police officers to safely do their jobs is some kind of luxury. And even in a number of cases, the police may fare better getting what they want from the cities. Maybe it’s because they carry guns.

Although the Beaumont fire union president stated yesterday that having four firefighters to an engine company would not have made a difference in the incident involving the injuries, plenty of evidence exists that it is definitely safer to have more personnel on the fire scene.

“A study conducted by the Seattle Fire Department found that the severity of fire fighter injuries declined 35% when staffing per apparatus was increased from 3-person crews to 4-person crews,” Michael McNeill testified before a congressional panel in 2004. McNeill, a district vice president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, retired after 33 years with the Denver Fire Department. “A study by the Dallas Fire Department found a direct correlation between staffing levels and both the safety and effectiveness of emergency response operations. Specifically, the Dallas study found that inadequate staffing delays or prevents the performance of critical tasks, increases the physiological stress on fire fighters, and increases the risk to both civilians and fire fighters. After analyzing their data, the authors of the Dallas study concluded, “staffing below a crew size of four can overtax the operating force and lead to higher losses.”

McNeill’s testimony also indicated the fire staffing debate even goes to the heart of cities adequately preparing for terrorist attacks.

“The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)-the consensus, standard making body of the fire service-recently completed a report entitled “Preparing for Terrorism: Estimated Costs to U.S. Local Fire Departments.” The study found that an additional 75,000 to 85,000 fire fighters are needed to fully staff fire departments to be able to safely respond to traditional emergencies and to minimally respond to terrorist incidents, said McNeill.”

I won’t hold my breath that the Beaumont City Council will come around to the side of sanity and institute a decent staffing level on the city’s fire engines. So incidents such as Monday’s flashover which injured six of our firefighters could very well repeat itself. Especially considering how much the department was zapped Monday after the structure fire, followed by a truck exploding after it ran off I-10 into Ida Reed Park. The driver of that truck was killed although no firefighter injuries were reported. As bad as Monday was for Beaumont firefighters, the outcome could be even worse next time.