The Lights of Como

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 24, 2004
The Lights of Como

By JARID MANOS

Como at Christmas is still a wifebeater kind of place. Meaning the kind of white undershirt tank tops that ’hood dudes wear as regular gear on warm days. Hanes or FTL, worn close-fitting, with loose jeans, and maybe a ballcap, skully, or kangol, and thin silver or gold chain.

I’m used to being a center of the cops’ (unwarranted) attention, but my neighbors across the street override me. I slip in and out mostly unnoticed. One afternoon, in her big white bra and big orange panties, the woman from over there lay flat on her back in the gutter, arms spread wide like she was about to make a concrete angel, legs up on the weedy Westside curb. “I’ma call the po-lice!” she yelled, shaking her head side to side. Her big-n-tall dark-skinned dude, potbelly stretching his wifebeater out, screamed down at her. “Bitch, get in the house right now!” “I’ma call the po-lice!” she screamed. “Get in the house,” he yelled.

He took a tire iron and began bashing in the windows of his Cadillac. First the windshield, then the side windows, then the back. Glass sparkled up like soda in a tv commercial. When she finally got up, he lumbered in ahead of her and slammed the door in her face. She banged. “Let me in!” Pounding. Silence.

She went back and lay down in the gutter and began shaking her head from side to side again, arms out, crying. “I’ma call the po-lice!” One of my block’s stray dogs gingerly walked past her, sniffing, but giving her moving head a wide berth. Somebody called the police. As they came, she got up, and her dude let her in. And wouldn’t let the police in.

Each night in Como more families put up their Christmas lights. Some hang simple “icicle lights,” while others string long lines of pure white lights together into elaborate winter scenes set in snowless Texas front yards of weeds, dirt, and buffalo grass, outlining shapes of animals, Christmas trees, and huddled figures. Still others create a carnival of multi-colored, brightly blinking, head-hurting lights covering their entire house and yard — especially the families recently arrived from Mexico, families who are gradually browning up Como. Brown/black integration is happening in every dirt-poor, still-rough ’hood in the West.

Our long-glowing prairie twilights and icy blue nights at this time of year connect us to drier lands further west. So many stars become visible in the winter-clean air and low humidity that I can see the Seven Sisters, the high-up little cluster that whispers through Plains Indian cosmology. With the winds regularly swinging from north to south, cold to warm, and back, ruled by winds we are, it’s hard not to want to reach for more, but that “more” — at that moment when the twilight seems to penetrate most — seems outside of this life. At times like this, when I was little, I’d get so exhausted that I thought I’d go to sleep and wake up the next day as an old man, my black hair turned white, and with a big, long, coarse white beard.

In a handful of houses, there’s activity all night long, cars coming and going. Cops also come periodically. Their blue-red-white strobe lights flash the block. After a late day at work, I slipped past them onto my dark porch, old insecurities about fitting some police profile still making me want to be inconspicuous. My shadow on the wall stopped me. In the flashing lights it was dancing, shifting side-to-side, rhythm on the old white-painted wooden boards. A sudden gust of wind exhaled through, shaking the few scraggly Texas trees and pushing over the long, winter-dried prairie grass in the vacant lot next door.

The following afternoon, dragging himself up my block, a hunched-over, bearded old man I’ve never seen before came dragging a big hunk of chain-link fence. It sounded like chains being dragged over the pavement, and I absolutely could not take that sound. An ashy old black man from Como, dragging chains. Pushing toward the end of a year and into a baby new one.

I have a scrawny-ass mesquite tree in my front yard. Right now its bare branches are shaking in a strong warm south wind hushing over us from Mexico. I walked to Walgreen’s and bought me a string of green lights for $3.99 and strung its top like a crown. It’s my Como Christmas tree. When the winds blow on a cold or warm prairie winter night, I feel so restless and flushed, I get excited. The green is for Earth, and I know somewhere up over the horizon we will have good, good news.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.