Heritage Church

While walking around in my new hood of Zilker, I came across a stark block building in the middle of a huge lot.  It's an odd sight in a part of town where every square inch of land is at a premium and new mcmansions occupy entire footprints of land, interspersed among the modest 1940s bungalows that came before. 

This desirable and expensive zipcode (04) was once "nothing," according to a middle aged native Austinite I flew home from Phoenix next to recently.  "We liked it, but it was a poor area."

It's beautiful, though.  The neighborhood abuts Zilker Park, the Central Park of Austin, and is filled with old, old oak trees and big shading magnolias.  Vines and weeds and flowering plants tangle all over each other here, in the Austinian style.  All of the old, gracious parts of the city are full of overgrowth - plants spill onto the sidewalks and streets and grow big and wild.  Pastel paint peels from old houses and fences lean on properties that, as values have skyrocketed, you'd never imagine are worth high six figures.  You cannot tell a home value by its appearance around here.  This is nothing like Phoenix, where properties are pathologically groomed and clipped and repainted and edged, and leafblowers rage at all hours of the day.

But the church.  This is what the sign said:

I have some comments about the sign.  1. Is it that noteworthy that some of the people buried here beginning in 1866 were born before 1840?  26 was that notable an age?  Or is 1840 a reference to Austin's early days that I didn't catch?  Does it simply mean to point out that they were born in the antebellum slavery period?  2. "In the 1940s, the wooden church burned."  Because this was Dixie once, I feel suspicious at the assumedly intentional ambiguity.  Why did it burn?  It's wet here.

Sealed tightly forever.  Why?  Why not a museum to early black culture and churches of this era?  Why not a space to share this completely ignored aspect of early Austin?  This city's interpretation of its own history is so whitewashed.  This building is not only significant because it's still here and the land is still safe, but it's a touchstone for a huge group of people who don't get their story told here almost ever.

Big, beautiful treeish lot.

But as the sign says, it's a church and cemetery.  Underneath the weeds in the green lot are headstones.  Incomplete headstones.  Stumps and chunks, leaning shards, mounds of local lime melding, very slowly, into the grass and networks of vines.

Someone mows it sometimes.  It's rained so much lately that it's impossible to keep the greenery down, and it shoots up in uneven patches.  I stepped gingerly in the grass, deep into the shady back area to look at the stones, praying against snakes and cursing that the foliage was so dense and moist that the big black Texas mosquitos, who normally pass on me, lighted on my bare skin with glee.  I don't know how to hike or walk in backcountry, and although this is in the middle of a dense city, it feels distinctly lonely and untrodden.  I watched the ground for those snakes.

Age 87.

Worn down stone looking like a natural occurrence and not a grave marker.

There were a lot of spots, much bigger than this, where the grass wouldn't grow.  Some of the spots were...grave-sized?  Multiple feet by multiple feet.  Why?  Why would this enthusiastic foliage not grow in certain patches?

Condos to the left, apartments to the right, encroaching right up to the edge of the protected space.  No doubt tens of developers have cruised the big empty space, populated only by that lonely box just one step above a shed, and cursed the city for setting it aside.  A lot like that?  DREAM CONDOS! With a stupid fucking name, like Zilker Commons, or Greenview, or Barton Heights.

I searched for clues about the church and cemetery and came up with little more than what's contained on that historical marker sign.  There's an inventory of the remaining stones, or what remained of them ten years ago.  I couldn't find as many as the website had.  It takes a jaded, weird fucking person, weird beyond any measure I can imagine, to steal a fucking headstone.  When I was a kid, I thought to linger too long by any old grave would tempt the spirit belonging to it to follow me home, and I worried in the car that an illicit tour of the Pioneer's Cemetery in Prescott, Arizona (it was pre-renovation and closed to the public in the 90s) might have caused some old ghost to follow us home and scare me in my bed at night.  Needless to say, even this morbid ass would not remove a memento like that from a cemetery, not to mention the fact that it's vandalism and ruins historic spaces for the rest of us.  I did take ball moss home from the Texas National Cemetery once (yep, Texas still thinks it's a country), but it died.

I mean, seriously.  Where the fuck do headstone thieves put their prizes?  In their herb gardens?  WTAF

I'll continue my researches, but this might require IRL reading in an archive.  I must say it was easier to find the dirt I wanted in Phoenix, even about the most obscure of historic properties.

I will say that Austin in this early steamy summer is pretty and charming south of the river.  The big tangle of green paired with two years of inordinate rainfall has the lightning bugs out in force, and they're at their densest in unmanaged green spaces.  Apparently the eggs lay in the earth for about a year before hatching upon us, and in heavy rainfall, they germinate wildly.  They float and twinkle in the dusk all over this area, they flow into my house when I open the door sometimes, they're so thick.  Ugly bugs in the light, but neverendingly charming outside.

Goth Chronicles part 5 of 500

I always thought it was kind of funny that my grandmother still listened to the music of her youth while she hung out at home in her 70s.  It can't have been that good, I thought.  Not tired of it yet?

One, it was that good, as I later found.  I love Glenn Miller just as much as she did.
And two, you never do get tired of it.

I found an old Sisters of Mercy cd in my car, scratched and beaten and practically trash.  Within moments I was playing Marian at a dangerous volume in afternoon traffic and wondering what Andrew Eldritch was doing right now. 



I guess the Sisters of Mercy are the greatest goth band of all time.  Other greats are, as Eldritch often incorrectly claimed about himself, not truly goth.  The Cure, Siouxsie, only peripherally goth.  Siouxsie's baroque theatricality was much too big for such a label, and Cure are their own genre.

I love to get super deep about this shit because I know absolutely no one cares anymore.  Except for Anita, but we have to be careful because we'll fight if we tread onto a topic where we disagree, such as Are persimmons good? or What is the greatest goth band of all time?  She'd say Christian Death.  And, as with many ancient friends who, in their ancientness, take on a sibling-like status, I can't back down.  Like two dogs seized on the same toy, we will shake and pull for hours, and it's best to just avoid it.

My goth playlists are my most popular playlists on 8tracks.com.  I feel the reason for this is because, unlike the old dance club djs from "BITD" (as Cher says), I know that people just want to hear the hits.  Don't throw in some experimental crap or a bad b-side just to show how advanced your taste is.  No one wants it!  They want an 80s drum machine, an angry Welsh man singing, deep bass, some synth, and that's it.







https://youtu.be/DJNUk-O2RlY
This. This is the song.

When I was trying to write about Bowie's death, I ended up writing about the Nile.  It got too tangential, so I deleted it, but it was fun to remember.

I might have been 15 the first time I went to the Nile.  Seems so crazy young, but I had already put in lots of time on usenet's alt.gothic, and after reading so much about goth clubs all over the world (mostly in the sentimental memoirs of 80s goths), I had to go to my own. 

I went on New Year's Eve and arrived to a big empty room, as most people had chosen parties instead.  It was a cavernous black space, occasionally cut through by revolving blue and white lights, and Bauhaus' She's in Parties played ghostly and tall in the dark.  This, I thought.  It was everything.

The walls, floors and ceiling were painted flat black, and the space outside the dance floor was pitch black.  Flickering prayer candles occasionally disrupted the darkness along the walls.  It was a venue for bands on other nights of the week, mostly punk and metal, and sometimes denizens of those scenes intermixed, bemusedly, with the goths, mocking and looking for girls.



Odd to think of being a teenager in this environment, out all night with this motley cast of characters, and odder still that I feel I was entirely undamaged by it.  There were addicts and runaways, creepy older men who I disgustedly avoided.  Basic guys who thought they'd blend in by putting on their only black Hanes t-shirt.  You didn't venture into side rooms lest you saw something you didn't want to, like kids shooting heroin, or people having sex while their spurned lovers cried in the corners.  That this happened an area overrun by Mormons was funny.  Everything was funny, because I was a kid, and unbothered by everything.



I didn't recognize the danger that was probably around, and I was unfazed by the people.  Many things converge in a goth scene, and pieces of other subcultural groups accumulate, having nowhere else to go.  Sexual fluidity, trans kids, nudity on the dancefloor, bdsm, genital piercings, occultism on behalf of people who actually believe in shit like enochian magic, these things were everyday.  Being gay certainly wasn't the source of tension that it could be elsewhere in life and otherwise straight people occasionally dated or experimented amongst their sex without notice from anyone else.

And nothing bad ever happened to me.  My friends were nice people, the people I dated were nice people, and I never fell into the traps that I realize now were opening and shutting around me at all times like venus flytraps.  I don't think I was as vulnerable as I seemed based on age, in part because of my total naivete to what people were actually doing, and to my disinterest.  I just wanted to be cool and dance.



It feels a little silly to even point this out as a thing because it just was, but all of this happened easily 20 years (and many more before me) before the rest of America began its slow tread to acceptance.  That was the best part about the scene.  Everyone just belonged, without comment, as long as they were there for the music or the aesthetic or, at least, were affiliated with someone who was.  It wasn't very complicated.  I saw a lot of lifestyles that aren't for me, but no more than I would see on the average trip to a mall.

It's also why I'm so disgusted by people who insist on being shocked by regular-ass deviance from social mores.  The dichotomy of being an adult, yet operating with the mind of a flappable, naive child is sort of repulsive to see in action.  I can't stand people who shrink from or are shocked by a past or a garden variety weirdness.