DIRTY SALLY
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Introduction
Crack
rolled up Highway 290 from Houston to Austin in 1981,
the same route the oil bust rode here in '86 and the
stock market crash in '87, so by September of '88
businesses were failing, banks going belly-up, and
no one in town was making money except the dealers,
lawyers and shrinks. The governor struggled to make
good on campaign promises to create jobs and reduce
prison overcrowding: new policies made to counter
a century of Texan excess left old prisoners languishing
for the remainder of century- long sentences on minor
drug infractions, while rapists and murderers plea-
bargained their way to short terms in county jail.
It would take another year till our first drive-by
forced the press, and then the cops, to admit that
gangs had been creeping around since the city charter
was ratified. In every quarter, near-prosperity gave
way to frenzy. Secure in my city job, I watched the
summer heat plow past Labor Day with no sign of slowing
down. Then Dirty Sally's famous legs first kicked
up smoke and I learned just what my thirty-nine thousand
a year would cost me.
That's
my partner Joey Velez in the picture, first row, second
from right, the big jovial guy with his arm around
my shoulders and his trademark chipped-tooth grin.
They snapped that shot last Christmas, three months
before Joey made The Ultimate Sacrifice-killed in
the line of duty. Eulogy delivered by a new police
chief he never met, marked in the reception area at
police headquarters by the last of a line of plaques,
one for every sucker who bit it on the company clock
since it was an hourglass. That's me in the Christmas
picture, Detective Sergeant Dan Reles—rhymes
with "trellis"—Austin Police, Homicide,
at six' feet even, just a shade shorter than Joey
with the stooped shoulders and busted nose of a mob-friendly
boxer the trade my father raised me to before his
fortunes turned and we fled prison-town upstate New
York for God's country: Southern gentility, high windows,
crack dens, trailer parks, whorehouses, six-month
summers, dead cops, beautiful wives, fat lawyers,
powerbrokers, future governors and fully lawful plans
to take over the world. They're not out to get you,
folks say, it's just how they do business. A new breed
of power is gestating in the Lone Star State, the
world's biggest lab of trial and error and you're
a guinea pig. Your mother and your best friend and
everyone you care about gets lost in the soup, the
reed you hang onto snaps, you grab that one last thing
you believe in, raging at the injustice as you hold
the world together with both hands and as the weight
of it drags you under, your air bubbles slop to the
surface and you know beyond possibility that it's
over-the last thing you give up is hope.
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