Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (36 page)

I

LOGICALLY THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN UNITED, NOT ONLY BY THE
common bond of oil that had kept them in clothes for sixty
years, but by the bonds of loneliness. As your car fought its way
across West Texas along Interstate 20 in the blistering heat and
it felt as though you had been in the state for a week and had
another week to go before you saw any sign of human life, they
suddenly rose out of the emptiness like territorial forts.

There was Midland with its improbably tall buildings, glassy
and shimmering in the sun like misplaced tanning reflectors.
Fifteen miles to the west there was Odessa, sprawling and oozing, its most striking feature the fenced-off fields with row after
row of oil field equipment that looked like rusting military
weapons from a once-great war.

It seemed natural that they needed each other, as all good
sister cities should, but instead they had spent most of their
histories trying to prove just the opposite.

Midland was the fair-haired, goody-goody one, always doing
the right thing, never a spot on that pleated dress, always staying up late to do her homework and prepare for the future.
Odessa was the naughty one, the sassy one, the one who didn't
stay at home but sat at a bar with a cigarette in one hand and
the thin neck of a bottle of Coors in the other humming the
tune of some country and western song about why it was silly
to worry about tomorrow when you might get flattened by a pickup today, the one who dressed like an unmade bed and
could care less about it, the one who liked nothing better than
to drag her sanctimonious sister through the mud in a little
game of football and then kick her teeth in for good measure.

In 1983, when the editors of Forbes compiled their annual list
of America's four hundred richest individuals, they had discovered that six people, each worth $200 million or more according to their calculations, lived in Midland. As for plain old
millionaires, which in a town like that had become as notable as
people saying they were going to church on Sunday or planned
to vote Republican (in 1976 Midland County became the first
county in Texas where more Republicans voted in a primary
than Democrats), various estimates pegged the number at two
thousand or so during the height of' the boom. If the number
was accurate, one out of every forty-five people in the town in
the late seventies had reached millionaire status.

Forbes published it glowing nine-page article about Midland.
Despite its eye-popping wealth, the article said Midland had
still retained all the quaint virtues of a small town. "There are
no chained storefronts, traffic _jams or pedestrians wandering
around wearing Walkman headsets. The Texas League baseball
park still has billboards on the outfield fence." There were a
few blemishes, according to the magazine, but they came from
Odessa.

"Why, I can pick out Odessa guys on sight," said a high school
student. "The guys are big, muscular, wear gaudy jewelry and
belt buckles big enough to eat their lunch off of."

At virtually the same time, Odessa found its way into the national press as well.

"For Murder Capital U.S.A., it isn't much just a depressed
oil town in an arid stretch of West Texas," wrote Newsweek. "But
last week little Odessa, with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 residents, gunned its way past Miami to take dubious honors as the
most perilous city in the nation this year....

It was easy to see why the two towns hated each other.

When oil started booming in the late forties the availability of
office space had made Midland a corporate center. As the
grunts of the oil business flocked to Odessa to work and service
the fields, the majors and colonels and generals came to Midland to control those grunts who worked the fields. They were
a different breed, with eastern roots that often included four
years at St. Paul's or Choate or Lawrenceville or Andover, followed by four years at Yale or Harvard or Princeton or M.I.T.
They were men with the hearts of pioneers and teeth sharpened to razor points by years spent dutifully at the knee of their
good daddy capitalists back east. Although he turned out to
be the most famous among them, George Bush was just one
among friends. In 1951, shortly after Bush had moved to Midland, the New York Tinges described it as a "modern" city whose
twenty-three thousand inhabitants could raise $200 million in
capital with little effort.

As the years passed the place became ever more exclusive.
Residents named streets Harvard and Princeton. They played
at the Polo Club, which had been started by a graduate of St.
Paul's and Princeton whose father had been an executive at U.S.
Steel. They sang high praises of a black waiter named Max because of his flawless performance at formal dinner parties at
their homes. They clearly saw their town as the one exception
in an area of the country once described as having enough ignorance to support not simply a four-year university but an
eight-year one.

People in Odessa, watching what was going on over in Midland, could only shake their heads amid the smoke in the bar
and wonder why God, of the millions of damn places in the
world he could have put them next to, had chosen one as
strange as Midland. The Ivy League didn't cut much muster in
Odessa, unless "Yalie" meant the same thing as "Okie," and
Odessans didn't seem bothered one bit by the oft-repeated slogan that people went to Midland to raise a family and to Odessa
to raise hell. There was no dispute that Odessa had its share of one-word bars and prostitutes and sometimes the only way to
win an argument was to shoot the guy, but it was free and funloving and a man was measured by who he was, not by how well
he concealed the size of his income.

Beyond oil, the two towns had nothing in common, not in
outlook, not in the style of the clothes they wore (Odessans
dressed free and casual, whereas it could be presumed that
Midlanders wore Polo Shop pajamas to bed), not even in the
quality of excess that marked these towns during nine very remarkable years from 1973 through 1981.

II

There were some nice stories about the boom that came out
of Odessa. There was the one about Jerry Thorpe, pastor of
the Temple Baptist Church, going with a parishioner down to
Vegas by private jet to watch the Holmes-Cooney fight and being given a $ 10,000 watch by him as a token of appreciation for
all those inspiring sermons.

There were several wonderful stories about the legendary
Ron Wells, who, according to his banker, had started his oil
field supply business with about $10,000 and suddenly found
himself with monthly cash flows into the hundreds of thousands. There was the one about how he invited his banker out
to the warehouse under the guise of discussing business and
they sat around drinking champagne instead and then hopped
over to the airport to pick up the Lear jet that Ron had just
given himself for his thirtieth birthday, and since it was kind of
stupid to let the plane just sit there and the day was pretty much
shot anyway, they flew to Vegas and gambled all night.

There was another one about the huge party Ron threw for
his customers out at the warehouse, where huge cattle tanks
were iced high with beer, and how he got up toward the end to
thank everyone for coming and then mentioned something about his air force, and how his two planes (by that time he had
a sixteen-seater Gulfstream I prop as well as the Lear) flew low
overhead with the symmetry of the Blue Angels and how some
of those in attendance were pretty impressed by the sheer balls
of it all and how one guy immediately whispered to his partner
that from now on he wanted of Ronnie to pay for his supplies
in cash so they wouldn't get stuck with a huge unpaid bill down
the road when the upkeep of the air force and all the other toys
got too expensive.

There were stories of welders who had trouble getting
through the alphabet without taking a break making between
$80,000 and $90,000 a year, and were so flushed with money
that when the state Highway Patrol picked them up for
drunken driving in West Odessa they often had $8,000 or
$9,000 in cash on them. There were stories of them marching
into Gibson's, the big discount chain that eventually went belly
up like everything else, and plunking down $2,000 or $3,000
to redecorate their mobile homes from head to toe. There were
stories of big, burly men coming into town in Rolls Royces to
sell as many Rolex watches as they could dish out.