Animism is the most primitive form of religion. It was obvious to a five-year-old that cars had souls. Most cars even had faces, but since VW’s were air-cooled, they had no radiators. So, our car seemed not to have a mouth, or at best, it had a closed mouth. Which was not a bad idea, in Dallas, when you think about it. Keep your mouth shut. Live longer.

That self-driving droid, figment of my active five-year-old imagination, with a GPS guidance system and the very best of robotic intentions, is ready to go, nowadays, except that most cowboys don’t like for anyone else to drive their black Dodge Rams. Nothing worse than having your kid brother drive you around town, podner. It’s castrating. A chip in the dash would be even worse.

Sort of like letting your girlfriend lead doing the Cotton-eyed Joe, also known as the South Texas National Anthem. You have to dance with your noisiest boots on, and you have to know when to yell, Oh, shit! In Texas, a guy has to lead on the dance floor, always drive (preferable, a big black pick-up) and never have sex on his back. Joe, incidentally, was cotton-eyed either because he was drunk, like most guys in Texas, or because he had syphilis. Maybe, both. But, he was gonna drive, anyway.

Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?

When we got home from school that day, Daddy was already there. That was strange, to find him not at work in the middle of the day. Especially, if the President was OK. His office was closed. It was downtown, by Dealey Plaza. He never spoke of what he had seen. He was glued to the television set, trying to figure out what in hell was going on.

I think he was thinking, fallout shelter, nuclear war, Soviet invasion, all that. And, get me back to Santa Fe, what an awful place I have brought my family to live. Once, he actually considered going to forest ranger school. So, he could go raise his family in the wilderness. Live on rainbow trout and piñon nuts. That was his walk on the wild side. 

At one pm on Friday, November 22, Daddy was dressed for yard work, tee-shirt and jeans, and staring intently at the news report. Cronkite was saying that the President of the United States had been rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and then that the President of the United States was reported to have a gunshot wound to the head, and then that the President of the United States was dead. Cronkite was noticeably moved. I wasn’t moved. I was traumatized.

And then Cronkite said that the casket carrying the body of the President of the United States has been loaded onto Air Force One, and was leaving for Washington, that Lyndon Baines Johnson was being sworn in as the Thirty-Sixth President on board Air Force One, with Lady Bird on his right and the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy, on his left. With blood on her lovely pink fashion statement. Lady Bird told Jackie to change her dress but she refused. She said she wanted the whole world to see what they had done to her husband. They.

They never said coffin, always casket. Sounds less like death, and besides, Dracula had a coffin, so the President of the United States had to have a casket.

As Air Force One took off from Love Field, carrying The Widow and the Thirty-Sixth President and The Body of the Thirty-Fifth President, with the back of his head supposedly blown off by a shot from behind, it passed right over the house. Daddy walked out into the front yard to see it fly overhead. Followed by Air Force Two. The other plane.

Jack Valenti was on Air Force One. Jack Valenti is best known for inventing the movie rating system. Before 1968, Hollywood censored itself with the Hays Code; no tits, no ass, no cuss words. Salty cowboys never said anything worse than by golly… And everyone was faithful, well-dressed and straight. And all movies were suitable for all viewers. A clean white Leave it to Beaver Puritan world. Walt Disney could not have come up with a bigger lie. Not quite what the founding fathers had in mind, free speech and all. But mostly, it was dated. It was ‘50’s America; naïve, innocent and prude. So Valenti set up a rating system. Keep your smut away from your fairy tales.

That’s him in the picture. The only one staring directly at the camera. He was the new PR man.

Texas had some smut of its own. Smut people were proud of, in fact.

It's just a little bitty pissant country place, nothing much to see. No drinking allowed, we get a nice quiet crowd, plain as it can be. --“MissMona”, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Chicken Ranch (no definite article for people in the know) was a place with some tradition, where truckers, engineering students and former altar boys could share a whopping case of gonorrhea that made everybody laugh except the guy who couldn’t piss without screaming. A client had to do some driving to get there. Most guys knew about it, and most women didn’t. Nobody wanted to talk about it, because that meant recognizing that it was there, that people always knew it was there and they wanted it to be there. It was what we called a public secret, comrade. It was a Texas tradition. Like barbecue, trail rides and the Cotton-eyed Joe.

Everything was fine until Marvin Zindler came along. He was a muckraker on the local television news in Houston. Marvin decided to shut it down. Not that he was a self-righteous Victorian or anything like that. Texas has a few of those, mostly female church-goers. That might not be fair to the memory of to Her Royal Majesty, by the way. Queen Victoria spent the first fifteen years of her imperial reign pregnant. Gee, Wally, I wonder how that happened?

Marvin Zindler was Jewish and proud of it. There was a Jewish Puritanism, but American Jews tended to be broad-minded. They were, in fact, a cultural challenge for the Plymouth Rock, Mayflower, turkey-eating witch-hunters with terminal constipation from Massachusetts who seemed to want to run the show on this side of the pond. It wasn’t that the Jewish moral standard was foreign or especially liberal. It was just that Puritans were pea-brained.

Marvin got after the Texas whorehouse because he was a sensationalist. A circus performer. The medicine show and the high wire act. His racket was ordinary corruption, filth and scandal. Mostly scandal, and the bigger, the better. More people watched, so the ads made more money. It was a business, and Marvin was a businessman. It was, also, a lot of fun.  

I remember Chicken Ranch; that’s what the guys called it. Not because there were any chickens anymore. It was code, so nobody had to say whorehouse in front of ladies and small children. Legend has it that during the depression, guys often paid for sex with a chicken. There was a tee shirt going around with a picture of an egg on it, that read, I just got laid at Chicken Ranch. But that was post-Marvin pastiche. Chicken Ranch reopened as a bar in the ‘90’s. Guys don’t get laid there anymore, or at least, not so’s you’d know.

So, there you are, ten years old, standing in front of the condom machine in the men’s room of the greasy spoon in La Grange. What was that for? Yeah, OK. This was pretty complicated. I was ten. The sad part was that the only way to save the next generation from HIV could only be found in vending machines in exchange for quarters in men’s restrooms in La Grange, because that’s where the whorehouse was. In La Grange, I mean, not in the actual restroom. Truth is, when I was ten, there was no HIV. We only had gonorrhea and syphilis. We were underdeveloped.

Where did you come from? Where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-eyed Joe? Oh, shit!

From the whorehouse in La Grange. Cotton-eyed Joe was code blindness due to corneal obstruction during the terminal phase, right about when syphilitics started to go mad.

Rednecks and their cowgirls still two-stepped to the Texas original in Ingram, Junction and Fredericksburg. College boys from A&M who didn’t never go kicker dancing before had to learn to yell, Oh, shit, just at the right time. Yeah, Oh, shit. Before antibiotics, you never got rid of syphilis. That was what the condoms were for. But they had to be a secret. Too many Puritan hypocrites, out there. Driving their Dodge Ram pickups down the interstate. Condoms sold in public places would give them away. And, church-going females would never tolerate seeing them for sale in the drugstore where they went for a cherry-coke with their church-going female friends, because they were shaped like the forbidden male member they were designed to protect.

In Brazil, 104 million condoms were given away every year at Carnaval. That’s one condom for every male in the country, regardless of age, with 8 million condoms left over. For a big event that lasted three days. And most people who can afford it buy their own because government-issue condoms smelled like surgical gloves. They tended to be too thick for connoisseurs and they were one-size-fits-all. Which it doesn’t. No comment.

So, if 104 million are given away, and maybe another 100 million purchased, then we can estimate 204 million sexual relations at least attempted during the three days of Carnaval. In a country with only 200 million people, which is phenomenal, considering that it takes at least two people and sometimes more to have sexual intercourse, and considering that small children and elderly people were usually not participating, at least not in statistically significant ways. And some people had theirs without condoms, which explained the very high birth rate in Brazil around Christmastime.

But in Texas, condoms couldn’t be sold at checkout counters because horny rednecks were ashamed to think that their redneck mothers might see them. Mothers who had raised their sons so well. A public secret, like Lyndon’s bastards. Everyone knew about them, but pretended they didn’t.  

Texas had a whorehouse in it, but Lyndon didn’t use condoms. He didn’t need to. He had lawyers and money. He had hitmen like Mac Wallace and Billy Sol Estes. Everyone knew, about the whorehouse, I mean, but in ’73, Chicken Ranch became official when Marvin put it on TV. Marvin Zindler, Eyewitness News. That was Channel 13, Houston’s local news. Marvin had been a consumer advocate on the radio for a while. He caught the used car dealers who rolled back the odometers. He lost his job when a new sheriff, friend of a used car salesmen, got elected.

In Texas, we elected our sheriff. That way, he could do most of his sheriffing on people who hadn’t voted for him, people who weren’t tall and white and redneck, like he was. We had some black city cops, and some Chicano State Troopers, but all our county sheriffs were tall and white and redneck; slow-moving, overweight men in pick-up trucks with diabetes, high blood pressure and a slow drawl. A reflection of white voters. Those were the people he protected.

Marvin Zindler was not one of those. He was short and he was Jewish. He was an ugly guy, ex-marine, WW2 veteran, but good with the microphone, which was how he got started on the radio. The producers told him he was too ugly for TV, so he had plastic surgery on his oversized nose and receding chin. He got a nice toupee for his bald head, then, he landed the job on Channel 13. And the ratings soared.

Marvin’s signature stories were his Rat and Roach Reports. He would visit local restaurants, and then show you the filth in the back. Slime in the ice machine was the line that made him famous. Once, he demonstrated how, at Mexican restaurants, customers could dip a chip in the hot sauce, bite it, and then put the bitten chip back in the hot sauce. There is a name for that. We call it double-dipping. The disgusting part was when the same dish of hot sauce got taken to the next table. In Mexican families, it was normal. In Puritan restaurants with white clientele who couldn’t pronounce the items on the menu, it was like kissing strangers who didn’t brush their teeth. It was like having sex with someone who had just had sex with someone else, no condoms.

Then came the story that made Marvin Zindler world-famous. Chicken Ranch, the renowned but secret whorehouse wasn’t in La Grange itself. It was nearby in Fayette, County. In 1973, when Marvin closed it down, it had been there for more than a century. Chicken Ranch began in 1844 when one Mrs. Swine (no relation to Miss Ima Hogg) brought three girls from Louisiana. I should say, three white girls. There were Mexican whorehouses, (and there still are) but they were in Bexar County. Marvin didn’t bother to close them down. In fact, you can even still double dip your tortilla chip, in Bexar County.

White whores were the scandal. This wasn’t France, podner. When the Bible-belt gets the upper hand, there can be no can-can. And, like Prohibition in the ‘20’s, it just drove the price up and the transaction underground. But it was a business, for God’s sake. The Baptist Lord helps those who helps themselves. So, hep yore-self. But keep quiet about it.  

According to John Wayne, when Crocket came to Texas, he was looking for something. Yeah, we know all about that. He was looking for a white piece of tale. In San Antonio de Bexar. In a church, for cryin’ out loud.

Anyway, Mrs. Swine got the message. There was money to be made. And where does one find white… girls? In Louisiana, of course. 

French doughnuts were not really white, comrade. They were golden brown. Parisian whores were not Parisian, either. They were Mediterranean girls. But they put white powder on them. The doughnuts, I mean. White powdered sugar. If there’s white powder on your girl at Chicken Ranch, it’s probably not sugar. Her name might be Sugar, though.

It was 1844, less than ten years after Texas became a Republic. Mirabeau B. Lamar was President. He had just moved the capital from Houston to Austin. His Vice-President was my foot-washing Bible-belting Presbyterian ancestor, David G. Burnet. And there wasn’t a damn white whorehouse in the whole God-forsaken place. How could Texas aspire to cosmopolitan culture under those conditions? How could you have a museum, or Shakespeare, or an opera house, for example, if you didn’t have white whores and expensive brandy? Now, we call it an escort service. A rose by any other name… It's all about marketing, comrade.

Whatever you want to call it, a hundred and twenty-nine glorious years of whoring came to an end because Marvin put it on TV. Marvin Zindler, Eyewitness News. Everyone already knew about it, but until we saw it on TV, (the way we saw the mangled bodies from Vietnam) we could pretend it wasn’t happening. Keep the fire burning, boys, kindle it with care. Public secrets can be tricky, though. Public secrets undermined overall credibility. Public secrets were like syphilis and presidential assassinations committed by lone assassins with three names and no friends. Once you got yourself mixed up with them, it was impossible to get yourself back out again. Oh, shit!

Marvin Zindler, Eyewitness News.