God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (28 page)

No movie.

I never learned exactly what happened. But I now owned a house way beyond my means. One lesson Hollywood teaches you is this: don’t buy the house until you’ve eaten the popcorn. Still, I was trapped in one of those periodic episodes of lusting after wealth and fame.

When the lady across the street moved to New York, her house stayed vacant for three months, with a For Rent sign in front. One day, Roberta asked a neighbor to help jump-start our car. She had noticed that the rent sign was down, so she asked our neighbor if the house had been rented. “Yeah!” he said. “To a movie star!”

“Really? Who?”

“I think his name is Mark McDonald, or something like that. They say he’s real handsome.”

Roberta thought for a moment, then guessed, “Matthew McConaughey?”

“That’s the one!”

She had seen some guy drive up in a big white van, wearing a cutoff sweatshirt. She almost took offense at the cheeky look he cast in her direction. Soon we began seeing him out in the yard, landscaping, usually with his shirt off, which attracted the attention of just about everybody. This was a few years before
People
magazine named him the “Sexiest Man Alive.”

The house is a little gray one-story bungalow, the kind of place that, if it were suddenly torn down, you wouldn’t remember what it looked like. Matthew labored to make it more attractive, putting in some sago palms and even some lights under the trees. He was certainly the world’s best tenant. Within a few weeks, he knew everybody on the block. We understood that his presence among us was a kind of secret.

The world seemed out of balance. Matthew was by now a multimillionaire, his face was all over the newsstands—anything I might have envied in terms of money and fame he had in abundance. And yet there he was, mowing the yard of a modest little rent house in Tarrytown. He was from Uvalde, west of San Antonio, about an hour’s drive from Mexico. He had gone to the University of Texas and was a big Longhorns fan. He got his break in the movie business in
Dazed and Confused
, by Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater. So there were many ties. But if he wanted to come back to Austin to live, there were much grander residences to consider—for instance, the house I couldn’t afford.

It finally occurred to me that what Matthew wanted was what I already had: a quiet existence on a pretty street, with nice neighbors and a degree of anonymity that was hard to come by for a face as recognizable as his. He wanted to somehow return to ordinary life. And I wanted to escape it.

On a Saturday afternoon before the UT-Baylor football game, Matthew invited the neighbors over for a cookout. He and Roberta talked about the team. She is not a real sports fan, but she had gotten a bit of a crush on the UT quarterback, Major Applewhite, a scrappy, undersized redhead who led many memorable fourth-quarter comebacks (he’s now the head coach at the University of Houston). Matthew was well known for hanging out with the players, so I teased Roberta by saying that he had met Major Applewhite. Roberta’s jaw dropped. “You know
Major Applewhite
?” she exclaimed. Matthew burst into laughter. I think at that moment he must have felt that he had really done it; he had achieved ordinary life.

One autumn night in 1999, around three a.m., I was awakened by the sound of loud talking and dogs barking. I tried to go back to sleep, but I heard car doors shutting, more barking, and then the instantly recognizable sound of a police scanner. I jumped up and pulled back the shade. There were four police cruisers in front of our house.

“Roberta!” I said. “Something’s going down!”

There was a cop standing in my yard when I came out. “Sir, do you live here?” he asked.

I nodded. “What’s going on?”

“We made an arrest at that house,” he said, indicating Matthew’s bungalow. Then he asked if I knew the person who lived there.

“Yes, it’s Matthew McConaughey. Is that who you arrested?”

The cop told me that Matthew was being charged with being “disorderly” and having a small amount of narcotics. I noticed Matthew in the back of one of the cruisers. “Can I talk to him?” I asked.

“No, he’s in a stupor,” the cop said.

He didn’t look like he was in a stupor to me. He was spitting mad.

“Someone in the neighborhood called in a complaint,” the cop said. “Actually, they called twice. He was disturbing the peace.”

“You’re the ones who woke me up,” I said.

The cop was clearly morose. “The females in my family think he’s the greatest guy,” he said. He added that the cop who made the arrest hadn’t known who Matthew was. That was the reason for the squad-car convention. An unmarked car pulled up and all the cops went into a huddle. They wound up taking Matthew downtown. “We’re going to low-profile it,” the cop assured me.

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

The news broke around noon. The story was that Matthew had been dancing around in the back of his house, naked, playing the bongos. Apparently he had left his back door open and annoyed a neighbor across the fence. When the cops arrived, they had spotted what they thought was a bong, so it turned into a drug bust. The cops burst into his den, and when Matthew yelled at them, they cuffed him. Then they swept up a bunch of his belongings in black trash bags—for “evidence.” As it turned out, there were no drugs.

Everybody in town was on Matthew’s side. Even Laura Bush confided at a party the next day that she was shocked at how the cops had behaved—entering a person’s house without permission and no warrant.

By that time there were TV trucks stationed in front of our house. The tabloid press was all over the story. It was galling to see how the press behaves around celebrity news; that’s one reason people hate reporters, even though this is exactly the kind of news they love to consume. The local paper committed the unpardonable sin of publishing Matthew’s address, and after that our little street became a promenade of mothers pushing strollers and teenagers knocking on Matthew’s door at all hours. Someone drove a nail into a tire on his van. The drug charges were dropped, but he paid a $50 fine for disturbing the peace. His fantasy of slipping back into ordinary life was punctured. The bongo incident “ruined it for me,” he confided on the morning he packed his furniture in a moving van. He could never feel safe here again.

I talked to Steve about Matthew’s broken dream of a normal existence. Steve was sympathetic, but he observed that movie stars like Matthew cultivate celebrity and can’t expect to escape notoriety. In any case, “he’s not a ‘normal’ person,” Steve said. “He’s a wild man living in Tarrytown.”

“I do not stand for what he stands for,” Abdeen remarked after the police had arrived and arrested six of the protestors. “But I know his fears and concerns are valid. I love this country so much, and I don’t like what I see coming.”

As the new administration was attempting to block Muslims from entering the United States, anti-immigrant posters started appearing on campus buildings. “Imagine a Muslim-Free America,” one said. A mosque was firebombed in Victoria in South Texas. Sid Miller, the boisterous agricultural commissioner, told the BBC that he worried about America becoming a Muslim country. (Muslims account for about one percent of the U.S. population.) He previously advocated dropping nuclear bombs on the Muslim world.

One of Roberta’s close friends is a writer who is married to a professor. They are Jewish. They have a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard. As Senate Bill 4—targeting “sanctuary cities”—was being debated at the capitol, an unsigned letter was slipped under their front door, threatening the lives of their children, by name. “Is this Austin?” Roberta cried.

There was hope for the Democrats, in 2014, that Wendy Davis—a glamorous blonde who captured national attention through her eleven-hour filibuster to block a bill banning abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy—would be the champion that Texas Democrats needed if they were to regain the statehouse, but she lost in a landslide to Greg Abbott. She even lost the women’s vote.

The 2016 presidential season promised to have a Texas stamp on it, with Perry and Cruz in the primary, along with Jeb Bush and Rand Paul, both of whom grew up in the state, and Carly Fiorina, who was born in Austin. They all washed out. Then, in early September, while the race between Trump and Clinton was tightening nationally, a
Washington Post
–SurveyMonkey poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead in Texas by one point. Other polls showed Trump very narrowly ahead. This in a state that Mitt Romney carried in 2012 by 16 points.

Texans aren’t used to being in play. We don’t have the deluge of television ads and candidate forums that swing states experience during presidential election cycles, or the strife and anxiety that attend meaningful contests. For nearly four decades the outcome in Texas has been so clearly preordained that it was like watching the election from abroad. In May, Hillary Clinton excited expectations when she said in an interview with
New York
magazine, “If black and Latino voters come out and vote, we could win Texas,” but her campaign director in Texas, Garry Mauro, quickly tried to douse unrealistic expectations. “We are not a battleground state,” he insisted. Hope would not be quenched, however. The Democratic Party, which hasn’t even got offices in many counties in the state, and had practically no identifiable candidates running for statewide office, stirred to life and began setting up operations in key cities. Senator Tim Kaine, the vice-presidential nominee, visited the state repeatedly, saying that he and Clinton “take Texas very seriously.”
The Dallas Morning News
endorsed Clinton, the first Democrat the newspaper had chosen in seventy-five years. In October, the Clinton campaign began a modest media effort in the state’s major cities, something that hadn’t happened in decades. In Austin, 90 percent of qualified voters were registered, along with 80 percent of all qualified voters statewide.

Texans were wrought up. A mother in a Houston suburb kicked her seven-year-old son out of the house when he cast the wrong vote in a mock election at his school. She actually made a video of the scene. “Bye, Donald Trump lover,” she says, as she forces the hysterical child out of the house with a suitcase and a sign: “My mom kicked me out because I voted for Donald Trump.” The mother later claimed it was a joke, but the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services opened an investigation. There was a telling obituary in the
Houston Chronicle
that read: “Elene Meyer Davis was born in Yoakum, Texas on the 7th of October 1924, and died on the 7th of June 2016, of complications due to congestive heart failure and the 2016 Presidential campaign.”

Despite the tumult and the expectations of a record turnout, only 42.62 percent of the registered voters actually went to the polls in Texas—again, one of the lowest in the nation. Young people, in the 18–24 range, vote at less than half the rate of those who are between 65 and 75. Only about 40 percent of those with a family income under $25,000 per year tend to vote, compared with about 75 percent of those whose income is above $75,000. Those with less than a high school education turn out to vote at a rate of 32 percent, a scale that rises to 82 percent for those with advanced degrees. The fact that turnout is chronically lower in Texas has less to do with race than it does with its disproportionate number of young, poor, and uneducated citizens. As Wendy Davis observed, “Texas is not a red state. It’s a nonvoting blue state.”

Trump carried Texas by 9 points, 52 percent to 43 percent, the same margin as Ohio. When I looked at the distribution of votes throughout the country, the blue cities against a blanket of red, it was hard to see where Texas ended and the rest of the country began. It is a red country with blue freckles.

Texas leads the nation in Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that if Hispanics voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue. “The difference between Texas and California is the labor movement,” Garnet Coleman, a Houston member of the Texas House of Representatives, told me. In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez began organizing the California farmworkers into a union, which didn’t happen in Texas, a right-to-work state. “Labor unions create a culture of voting and political participation,” Coleman observed. In Texas politics, Coleman believes, “everything is about race. It’s veiled as public policy, but it encourages people to believe that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black and brown people.” Political views have become more entrenched because of redistricting, and yet the demographic majority in Texas is far more progressive than its representatives. Coleman predicts a showdown. “This is the battle about the future of the country, based on a new majority, and we have to have this out.”