Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry Page A

said.
    “I can spend them too,” the man said, easing down from his perch. “I’m Kendall.”
    “Hi, Kendall,” I said. “Thanks for warning me about the pit bulls.”
    “I’d rather live in a dumpster in the great city of Houston than to own the best wheat farm in the Panhandle,” Kendall said. “I hate wheat and I hate farming and I hate the goddamn Panhandle. Do you own a machine gun?”
    “No, why?” I asked.
    “They’re about the only weapon that’s effective against the common pit bull,” Kendall said.

20
    Dismuke Street, as I recalled, was in the Lawndale area—an area between the Gulf Freeway and the ship channel that was the home of many warehouses. I could not recall that Dismukewas much of a street, and my memory was accurate not only as to its location but also as to its not being much of a street.
    The mere fact that I still had such a good memory for even relatively minor Houston streets—those, that is, with no mythology—struck me as a good sign, in terms of my aesthetic future. Perhaps I could yet manage to become the city’s Balzac.
    On the other hand, my brief encounter with Kendall, a well-spoken man who lived in a dumpster, seemed like a bad sign. Why was I fated to keep running into eccentrics on the order of Godwin, Kendall, and the several hundred others I had run into through the years? Was the whole human race eccentric, or was there something within me that drew eccentrics to me like filings to a magnet?
    In fact, the constant presence of eccentrics was the one constant factor in my life. Even a reclusive strategy didn’t really save me from them, for if I wasn’t still meeting them on the street or in hotel lobbies or airports, my imagination was spewing them up in an unending, disquieting stream.
    Even “Al and Sal,” my one hundred-and-ninety-eight episode hymn to normal American domestic life, had its share of eccentrics, including Al, the most normal male I had ever been able to imagine. An automobile salesman by day, Al became a lawn fanatic at night. One of the staple comedy lines in the series, sure to be worked in at least every third episode, was Al’s penchant for mowing his lawn at one in the morning. He had equipped his power mower with automobile headlights so he could do a neat job of mowing. Naturally Sal, the kids, and the neighbors all objected to this particular, sleep-disturbing eccentricity of Al’s. The kids sometimes ran away from home rather than go to school and face the taunts of their peers, taunts all directed at their father’s eccentricity. Sal constantly threatened to leave if he didn’t promise to mow the lawn only in the daytime, and the neighbors tried everything from lawsuits to sabotage to stop him.
    Al, a stubborn man, held his own with them all, sometimes operating his lawn mower and his power hedge-trimmer untilthree in the morning. He refused to yield. “Leave!” he told Sal (she didn’t). “Leave!” he told his children (they left but soon came back). The neighbors he told a great variety of things, edging as close to “Fuck you” as we could get on a national network.
    “I’m proud of my lawn,” Al said. “Due to the fact that I have to make a living for a bunch of ingrates, I can’t devote the daylight hours to taking care of it properly to the extent that it deserves, you know. So I devote the nighttime hours to taking care of it properly. You want me to neglect my lawn? Are you communists or what? I’ll never neglect my lawn. Not unless they bury me beneath it will I neglect my lawn. All of you whom don’t like it, get blanked.”
    At first the network refused to allow Al to say “Get blanked”—several screaming-match meetings were devoted entirely to the subject—but finally they let us try it and it worked so well that within a month millions of Americans who habitually said “Get fucked” were saying “Get blanked” instead.
    Al, my lawn eccentric, not only managed to clean up the language slightly;