The Mayor of Titty City

Joaquin LaMore, the mayor of Titty City, stood on the front porch of his bungalow and watched white sand swirling up his street, escaping from his beach. The wind off the Gulf of Mexico was strong this time of year, just after the summer crowds had gone home. The sand reminded him of when he was eight or nine and his father had taken him on a business trip to New York. He parked Joaquin on a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan, told him not to leave that spot, and stayed gone for six hours while the boy watched snow blowing along the street. He’d never seen snow before. He stared at the two- and three-foot drifts, so like the dunes on the barrier island his father had just bought and named Titty City.

It was dusk and the moon was just starting to show over the water.

The other bungalows on his street were dark and empty. Some of them were short-term rentals and the rest were vacation homes for wealthy families from Houston and San Antonio. Joaquin was the only local living that close to the beach. Dogs that had gotten hopelessly separated from their drunken owners among the dunes lurked between several of the bungalows. Joaquin couldn’t see them but he could hear their whimpering. They’d be feral and dangerous in a few weeks, and he’d have his police chief go around and shoot them.

He got in his truck and drove to the Baptist church for his A.A. meeting. You couldn’t see the building from the main strip. Joaquin’s father spared a line of dunes from the graders he’d used to level Titty City, and he hid the church behind it. He felt it would be wrong to not have a church on his island, to the same extent it would be wrong to distress a man emerging from one of his strip clubs or poker rooms to have to look at a church.

On an island with 1,200 people living there year-round, the best turnout Joaquin could hope for on a Tuesday night like this was seven or eight, including himself. The core group was him and three old timers, all of them former employees of his father: Bill, Dale, and Alice. None of them liked Joaquin much because when his father died and he took over the island, he mismanaged the businesses on the strip and let the beaches become littered with empty beer cans and balled-up dirty diapers. And when he got sober, he did it by finding Jesus. He offered national chains and legitimate regional retailers all kinds of inducements to come to the island — to attract a cleaner, more stable kind of visitor and replace the strip clubs, massage parlors, and bars. Bill, Dale, and Alice got thrown out of good-paying jobs and into minimum-wage work. But Joaquin at least kept the name Titty City, for his father. By the time he gave up on religion it was the late 1990s and the Jesus freaks were taking over Texas politics, so he decided to leave well enough alone and not try to bring back the sin trades. It would be hard enough to withstand the pressure to change the name of his island.

Joaquin turned on the fluorescent lights of the church’s community room and set up six folding chairs in a circle in the middle of the room.

He heard the rattling engine of Bill’s very old Plymouth in the parking lot. He hoped Bill wouldn’t be the only other one to show. Of the three of old timers, he’d been closest to Hassle LaMore and so he was the one most disappointed with Joaquin.

“Howdy, mayor,” Bill called out from the dark hallway.

“Hey, Billy. You think it’ll be just us tonight?”

“Maybe. Dale and Alice are still recovering from the end of the season, and who knows if anybody else will show.”

Joaquin winced.

Before Joaquin’s ascendancy, Bill’s job was to run whatever errands needed running between Hassle’s business interests on the island and beyond. Hassle had taken out hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans, mostly from S and Ls but also from a few big commercial banks, and bought raw land, office buildings, car lots, an airplane leasing business, an insurance company, pawn shops, bars, restaurants, three department stores, and Dairy Queens in Houston, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Brownsville, Harlingen, and McAllen. Hassle crowned himself king and made Titty City his capital, and Bill became his secrets keeper. Hassle never repaid the money he’d borrowed. He constantly shifted funds from one account to another to another, knowing the churning would look like prosperity. Bill helped him do that. Eventually, his empire collapsed and the only thing he managed to keep was Titty City. It was the only thing he really wanted to keep.

Now Bill’s job was to keep track of the hundreds of golf carts on the island and make sure they were clean and fully charged before they were rented out again.

“Well, we may have a whole fucking cake to eat between the two of us,” Bill said as he sat a pink cake box on the card table.

“Good thing I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

Bill looked him over slowly.

“Look at you: rail thin. You never had much of an appetite. Your dad used to worry about that.”

Joaquin knew he was lying. Sometimes Bill wanted the two of them to share moments when they remembered Hassle lovingly, without rancor on Joaquin’s part.

The wind picked up and rattled the windows. Sprays of sand hissed against the glass. If it didn’t let up overnight, the preacher would have to sweep half a foot of sand off the porch in the morning.

The strength and insistence of the wind was starting to unsettle Joaquin. He hadn’t kept up with the weather reports that day. He’d spent it at home plowing through some of his father’s legal detritus, looking for accounts in which Hassle might have squirreled away a few dollars if for no other purpose than to keep it out of the hands of the feds. The ledgers and stuffed file folders were so many family photo albums.

“You know what I caught two drunk kids doing on Broadway Saturday night?” Bill said, now sitting opposite Joaquin in the circle, the two of them forming its poles. “Jousting with golf carts and using folded up beach umbrellas as lances. And the one who fought the hardest to keep going was the one who was most fucked up. He had a nasty gash on his cheek and blood all over the front of his shirt. It reminded me of Titty City’s glory days.”

Bill’s digs about how small life on the island had become didn’t upset Joaquin anymore. He felt the loss, too.

They reminisced about the time that woman showed up on the island with her husband and two days later went home with two new ones. And when gonorrhea became so prevalent that the toilet bowls and urinals in the bathrooms of Titty City were stained green. And when a man’s bloated body washed up onshore with a chord tied around its neck, and the police chief said they didn’t need to bother the medical examiner on the mainland for what was obviously an accident.

Bill laughed and shook his head in mock disbelief the way he usually did, and Joaquin chuckled.

After a few seconds of silence, Joaquin said, “You ready to get started?”

From the moment he stepped into his first A.A. meeting, there was no question that he’d chair them all until he relapsed, moved away, or died.

Joaquin’s authority – his right to rule Titty City and its people – was broad, but it was also shallow.

“No. I’m not ready,” Bill said. “In fact, you know what? Let’s just call it a night. I don’t need the Serenity Prayer, or a relatable story from you, or a reading from the Big Book to stay sober, at least not today.”

“Why’d you come over then? You even brought a cake.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been thinking clearly lately. In fact, I’ve been thinking it’s time for me to retire. Maybe it’s past time. I’m 72.”

“We’d miss you, Billy. A lot. The two of us are the last real connections to Dad.”

Bill pursed his lips and studied his boots. Bill had forgotten what his own father had looked and sounded like, but he could close his eyes and see each one of Hassle’s many faces and remember whole conversations the two of them had had. Joaquin, with an awkward, involuntarily jerk of his head, looked out the window.

“Joey, what are you going to do? You told us that you were renouncing the throne and you took the title of mayor. You said you’d stand for election, and that it would be free and fair. And here we are – Titty City has been holding its breath for a year and a half – and nothing’s happened.”

“You want to run against me – is that what you’re getting at, Billy?”

“I’m saying something has to change. This island needs something more than you’ve been able to give it. It needs a stronger hand.”

Joaquin’s face flushed and he could hear his heart beating in his head. He kicked the folding chair closest to him, sending it skittering across the room and slamming into the card table. The devil’s food cake that Bill had taken out of the box made a wet sound when it hit the floor.

Joaquin stormed out of the room.

Hours later he sat cross-legged on the beach watching waves carry moonlight to the shore. A bonfire popped and hissed fifty yards or so behind him, close to where thin patches of wild grass grew out of the sand, the border between beach and dunes. Joaquin turned around and saw a hunched figure wrapped in a light blue blanket. He squinted. It was a man who getting just close enough to the flames to light a cigarette. A wind gust came through and sent a shower of embers and sparks over the dunes. Joaquin saw the faintest outlines of what he thought were people walking between and over the mounds. The man straightened up, turned toward Joaquin, and waved, inviting him to the bonfire.

“Where’re you from?” Joaquin said as he took his place next to the man, who was maybe 70, lean, dark, and completely bald.

“Titty City, just like you, mayor.”

“Sorry, sir, but I don’t think so. I’ve lived on this island since I was nine, and I know every soul on it. Between my father and me, we signed every birth and death certificate, officiated at most weddings, and done favors for and given gifts and loans to everyone. And I’ve never seen you.”

“Well, I’ll prove it with what I know. I know you’re giving up your birthright and that the people of Titty City are both heart-broken and relieved. Your failings have deepened the sense of loss we’ve felt since your father died.”

Joaquin wanted to push the old man into the fire.

“Look, my father was a great man, so a lot of people felt like they knew him. They didn’t. They didn’t know a thing about him.”

“I was one of your father’s bankers. I was the CEO of the First Intercontinental Bank of Dallas, one of the biggest S and Ls in Texas. And I personally signed off on every loan we gave him, met with him over dozens of lunches and dinners, went hunting with him, and when it all crashed down, I had a revelation: your father was the realest man in Texas. So I moved here and spent a lot of time with him. Did you ever ask who found him after his esophageal varices ruptured? It was me. He was on the floor of the private bathroom in his office. But the entire building was flooded with his blood. As we discovered later, it had even seeped into the foundation.”

Another wind gust blew in from the Gulf of Mexico, the sharpest yet. It sprayed their backs with sand and sent the flames desperately reaching for the dunes and the wild grass, crazy to get at them.

“I know you sent out a message to the town council and administrators tonight calling an election in November and declaring that you’re not running. I’m not here to try to talk you out of it. It’s the right thing. And I’m not here to tell you how disappointed Hassle would be in you. He foresaw that you’d nearly break Titty City, and he forgave you. I’m here to tell you that everyone on this island saw your father for the man he was, a king, and they loved him. You never understood him like we did. That’s how it is with great men: their subjects know and love them better than their supposed intimates. But I didn’t come here tonight for recriminations, so I’m sorry. Truly. I came here to thank you. The islanders will eventually summon our next Hassle into being, just like the people of Texas summoned your father. They’ll create him out of nothing but their longing. And you’re making that possible.”

The old man then bent down, reached into an old satchel and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He handed it to Joaquin, who accepted it gratefully but had barely enough strength left to open it. He turned away from the banker and for a couple of minutes watched black waves shatter the silver moonlight on the surface of the Gulf, the sand stinging his eyes. He took two long gulps and then walked toward the dunes, which were deserted now — the people were gone. He sat down in the seam between two dunes. He crossed his legs, drank, and wept. Finally, he passed out.

The wind was howling by then, driving the sand relentlessly against Joaquin’s body. It invaded his nose and mouth, blinded him, and stopped up his ears. And it soon covered him completely.