A rent stable was a bit like a whorehouse. Parish Stables off Bissonnette just outside the Houston city limits on the southwest side was no different. You paid your money down and you got an hour on the horse Mrs. Parish picked for you. Mrs. Parish was old and fat. She wore thick glasses and bright red lipstick. She never moved very far from the ramshackle office with a soft couch, a black-and-white TV and what Houstonians used to call a winda unit. 

She would take your ten dollars, then ask you, English or Western?, meaning what kind of saddle you wanted. She would scrawl that on a piece of paper, along with the name of a horse, and you had to give it to Mack or John. Winsome was the big buckskin they used to ride over to the Seven-eleven to buy the beer at night.  Blaze was
mean. Star was crazy. And Jim was the one she gave you if she thought it was your first time.

The kids used to call Jim, the movie star. The story was that he had starred in The Alamo, a four-hour feature film extravaganza with an intermission from the early ‘60’s, before our innocence was lost. In the southern part of Texas, near the town of San Anton, lies a fortress all in ruins that the trees have overgrown. That one. Written and directed by John Wayne. (Yes, the John Wayne.)

The songs were touching. The green leaves of summer are calling me home. The speeches were maudlin. When I come down here to Texas, I was looking for something. I bet you were, Mr. Crockett; free whiskey, cheap land and loose women. John Wayne’s version of the good old days in the Texas badlands was nauseatingly patriotic. There’s right and there’s wrong. You gotta do one or the other. So, they hid out in a church and shot Mexicans until they were out of dry powder and balls. Rifle balls, that is. The Alamo was a picture show about which historians would come to say, not a single scene corresponds to any historically verifiable incident. Wayne played Crockett, but he was too tall. Laurence Harvey played Travis, but he was too old and pompous.

And our Jim, the horse, was in it. He played a horse. That’s probably why he was dead quiet, too. Our venerable plug had seen his thirteen days of glory at the siege of Alamo so, he was used to John Wayne’s bullshit. He knew that Hollywood muskets and canons only fired blanks. Let the old men tell the story, let the legend grow and grow. By 1975, Jim didn’t look like much of a legend. Just one more creaky old pony rustled up by John Wayne to reinforce the fervent belief that all Mexicans are bad news and all foreign wars are holy.

It was classic anti-immigrant rhetoric, but it was also a Cold War pamphlet. In a polarized world where annihilation by one’s imaginary enemy was an imminent possibility; military readiness was a matter of survival. The survival of western civilization, the world as we know it, all that jazz.

Every musket is ready. Every man holds his sword. Cold War saber-rattling at its finest. When the shooting was over, Jim, our equine movie star woke up one fine afternoon on a California auction block. A dealer saved him from the knackers and shipped him off to the Houston swamp. In his new career, he was a gelding whore at Parish Stables.

But there was another Jim, the Horse. In 1900, Jim, the Horse, was pulling a milk wagon in St. Louis. He was black, about fifteen-two with long ears. Then science gave him a new job. It was easy. All he had to do was eat hay and generate serum. Doctor-looking guys with mad scientist haircuts and white lab jackets that went all the way to the ground injected him with pus from someone who had contracted diphtheria. Then, they waited. Then, they drew blood and put it in a centrifuge to separate the serum from the cells. Then, they injected the serum into little school children, and the little school children didn’t die of diphtheria. Other little school children, the ones who didn’t get the serum, died. It was science, and there was an epidemic.

Then, the doctor-looking guys packaged Jim, the Horse’s serum in little glass vials and sold it for a nice profit, considering that it was Jim who had done all the work. Jim produced thirty quarts of serum during his immunological career. Quarts, not liters. Not even scientists used metric measurement back in 1900.

Then, Jim got tetanus and had to be destroyed. But not before producing his last quart of serum. It got packaged and sold. A little girl with diphtheria got a shot of serum. She got well from her diphtheria and promptly died of tetanus. Then, twelve more little children died, because no one was keeping track of which vials might have tetanus in them. And if they threw them all away, other innocent school children would die of diphtheria.

It was an entangled mess. And so, the Food and Drug Administration was born. The problem with vaccines was that they were alive. If you boiled them for twenty minutes to kill all the germs, they didn’t work. Sometimes, there were other things going on in the warm animal bodies that pharmaceutical companies used to eat the hay and generate the serum.

Vaccines don’t cause autism. That’s a myth disseminated by South Austin vegans, composters and tree-huggers who smoke too much weed. But a hundred years ago, it was a Darwinian jungle out there. Vaccination was a hot spot for viral novelties looking to jump the species barrier. It was a career opportunity for upwardly mobile germs, a potential turning point for the evolutionary future of the biosphere. Horse serum was like a lusty evolutionary tumble in the hay with strangers. You had no idea what you might come down with, but with any luck, you might grow up to be as pretty as a milkmaid with a starring role at MGM. Just like Jim, the horse.