A Hurricane and a Home Invasion
Welcome to Hellston
Long a bastion of Republican skulduggery, Houston Texas may have met its own standard for capitalist excess a few weeks ago when Hurricane Beryl laid waste to its wobbly infrastructure and Centerpoint Energy failed to restore power in a manner befitting the continuation of human life.
I should know. I flew right into it.
Bodies are still turning up. Twenty-three and counting so far, and that’s not from the hurricane, it’s from the power failure. Who would have guessed it, but apparently building cheap brick-and-Tyvek houses in flood-prone areas and then shackling them to a fragile energy grid almost wholly dependent on natural gas (renewables are “liberal” and are therefore to be shot on sight) spells catastrophe for the millions of people living in our nation’s fourth largest city.
It was almost 100 degrees inside my son’s North Houston house. There was no air conditioning, no stove, no hot showers, no lights, no television (until the deafening generator got going, but even then there wasn’t enough juice to power much more than a box air conditioner in the back bedroom.) My son’s friend, also without power, slept on a mattress on the floor that we had to walk across in order to get to the bathroom. There was a hyperactive husky, two cats, a revolving carousel of mosquitoes, and the city’s notorious “air you can wear” to put the cherry on top of that jubilee.
In Houston, these types of disasters are getting closer and closer together. They are, in fact, a new normal that city council would be wise to address before it’s too late and Houston is simply washed away. Houston needs massive underground conduits to siphon flood water into the Ship Channel. It also needs a governor that doesn’t have his head completely up his ass (Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Centerpoint CEO Jason P. Wells were cavorting in China at the time on an opaque “business deal.”)
A functional infrastructure that hasn’t been starved of funds and isn’t powered by natural gas might also be a nice gesture.
I was in Houston to see my son get sworn in at his police precinct. Since most of the traffic lights were down, I was late to the ceremony, which upset me terribly since I’d flown halfway across the country to witness this event.
It was strange for this liberal creative to find herself in the belly of the conservative, law-enforcement beast. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable in these environments, especially since the political overtones are impossible to miss. Plenty of flags, shiny badges, God-and-country, testosterone. Even the women exude it, like a bizarre aftershave.
I respect the job that law enforcement does in this country and am no rabid de-funder, but the law, any law, when enforced by human practitioners, is a flawed and uneven instrument. When I was younger, I condemned its obvious defects as a justification for my hatred of all authority. Now, I realize that imperfection is the most we can expect from any judicial body, and that without our faulty attempts to enforce the law, we devolve into chaos.
Or Russia.
And chaos erupted in the most painful way the day before I returned to Manhattan. In fact, my son came close to dying. Knowing that in his line of work, risk is part of the job, I live in a mental space called Denialand. It’s nice here. Comfy. Sometimes there’s cable.
It was 5:30AM and still dark outside. My son was in uniform and heading out to work. That’s when he spotted the car pulled up to the back of his truck, which is what thieves do when they’re offloading your belongings. He also saw a flashlight shining from underneath the garage door, and he heard the sound of voices.
It’s a good thing training automatically kicks in under such conditions. My son unholstered his service weapon, pointed it at the garage and said, “Police. Put your hands up.” His most pressing concern was to get the thieves out of the garage and away from his house. If they fled into the house instead of away from it, he would have a much greater problem on his hands.
In this case, the thieves simply ran. My son chased them up the block, even though some of the street lamps were out and visibility was poor. The thief he had in his sights, wearing a purple hoodie, plunged his left hand into his waistband, pulled out a gun, and fired about three shots behind him. My son took cover behind a car and returned fire.
That’s when his gun jammed.
Yes, these things actually happen. Previously, I’d thought gun jams were clumsy plot devices. While he was attempting to fix the jam, a second gunman shot at him from his right side, and by some miracle, the gunman missed.
That’s when my son realized that he was in what law enforcement calls “the fatal funnel,” which is the most vulnerable position you can be in during a shootout. Standing in a doorway qualifies as a fatal funnel. So does creeping down a hallway with your weapon drawn. They could see him, but he couldn’t see them. Now that his gun was unjammed, he returned fire, but they were gone.
Meanwhile, his father called 9-1-1. “Shots fired, police needs assistance,” he told the dispatcher. Fifty squad cars converged on the neighborhood. Fifty. Almost the entire precinct. They deployed dogs, a helicopter, four drones.
Shooting at law enforcement is a capital offense in Texas. They take poorly to that kind of thing. After a week or so, they did find two of the home invaders, a twenty-year-old and a seventeen-year-old, whose lives are essentially over before they began.
The press showed up and got the story wrong. That’s concerning. It forces you to consider how many other stories they are bungling. Maybe that’s another public-interest profession we ought not to starve of funds. By their accounting, the thieves were only going after my son’s pickup truck and he randomly shot at them.
Behold this marvel of reporting.
I can only imagine what must have been going through the thieves’ minds when they heard my son identify himself as a police officer. Of all the houses, they had to go and hit this one, right? As it happened, some members of their gang did manage to make off with my son’s father’s pickup truck, which was eventually recovered. What was stolen, of course, is that nice comfortable denial I talked about earlier. Once it’s gone, it’s a bitch get back again.
At one point during my seven days in hell Houston, I suggested my son and his friend join me for coffee at the only place that had power, a restaurant called Black Rifle Coffee Company on F.M. 1960. I thought “Black Rifle Coffee” was quaint or fanciful, possibly a reference to the color of their dark roast. After I walked in, I nearly clutched my pearls and ran. The walls were photo murals of men with machine guns. The menu had items called “The 1776,” “The Sausage Grenade,” and “The Freedom Bowl.” There was one of those flags ritually folded into a triangle, framed, and then propped above the fireplace. The whole room was done in quien es mas macho slate gray and khaki green, just in case drinking cold brew caused you to spontaneously develop a vagina.
It was a Starbuck’s for (mostly) men who hated Starbuck’s and felt gay asking for a venti anything. Black Rifle Coffee Company is, in fact, owned by a veteran who clearly has a specific political point of view.
And this is where we’re at now. We can’t even have coffee under the same roof without some kind of liberal cross-contamination occuring, and if you live on the east- or west- coast, you have no way of knowing this is what they think of us, unless of course you watch Fox News.
By the time I got back to Manhattan at midnight (my flight was cancelled while I was strapped into my seat, so that was another death lozenge), I’d never been so glad to be home. Even the filth and tumult of 14th Street felt more welcoming than anything I’d experienced in Texas.
This feeling hasn’t left me. I’m grateful even for the barista at 9th Street Espresso that pipes his own off-key music through the restaurant’s speakers and then sings along to it in the most cringeworthy way possible.
Statistics aside (and our latest statistics indicate that violent crime is trending down), it’s hard not to feel as though we’re all being invaded in one way or another. I don’t think we’ve even dealt with the psychological trauma of forced isolation and our deadly pandemic. Both sides of the political aisle see the problems; we merely have different ideas about solving them. There’s a faction that’s so ultra-rightwing, Trump isn’t Trumpy enough—they want disgraced (former) national security advisor Mike Flynn. That’s how far off the reservation we’ve come.
And yet, despite all this, I am not without hope. Not about Texas, necessarily. Until Texas can rid itself of the Good Ole White Boys Club, it will always bear the shame of having the worst quality of life of all fifty states. I mean us as a nation. We might just rally around our first Black/Southeast Asian/female presidential candidate and pull this off.
And if I can stay away from hurricanes and home invasions, I might just live to see it.
Copyright © 2024 Stacey Eskelin
I know I'm too much of a lefty to say this, but "and then his gun jammed." (FFS, don't say "gun," say "weapon." Personal experience -- they get REAL upset by the word "gun.")
Anyway, this is why I will only ever lean on a revolver. Preferably a S&W, so that I'm not hoping on an independent, floating firing pin. Ask your son. He'll know.
And I'm really, REALLY glad that he's OK.
And, like I said, this is not the sort of thing a lefty is supposed to admit or own up to.
One of the things that VP Harris is up against is ACAB. (Remind your son that, unlike the convicted felon, she was a DA and then an AG.)
If memory serves (which is rare enough) TX is the only state where the entire power infrastructure is on a for profit system. Thank Dog it isn't socialism ...
i am so sorry your son....and you...had these dreadful experiences. would be so nice if texas would just secede and take musk with it.