One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

XVII. Providence Street

89 XVII ProvidenceStreet Iwas released from Brackenridge County Hospital on February 3, 1983. A couple of months of hospitalization did not prepare me for the flood of disappointments I would endure when I returned to my home. I couldn’t stay awake, so I didn’t leave the bed much. Memories of everyday life and of my dearest friends were either erased completely or bewilderingly abbreviated. It was way beyond my ability to understand the depth of my injuries or how it would affect every one of my relationships. Though it may sound selfish, I was consumed with my own unanswerable questions. Would I ever walk like before? Would I talk, taste, feel my arms and legs, much less play music and resume my career? If so, how? “Both Vince and Melody were in therapy after they got home,” says BobSturtevant.“Eachofthemwasinadifferentworld,almostasthough they were living in separate houses. It felt like a house of anguish.” Kathleen appraised the situation, “Once Vince and Melody got back to the house, they just didn’t know each other anymore. They were both in their own private pain, their own private worlds.” 90 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell � ฀ � ฀ � Shary says, “Vince was awake, but you really couldn’t talk to him. His eyes were dilated. One minute he would be sitting there awake, and you would talk with him. He could talk back, but it was barely above a whisper, and he didn’t have full breathing. He was really slow. He’d be talking to you and just fall out, asleep. I mean just off and on, like narcolepsy. He was like that for a long time.” My mother used to call that house on Providence “the doll house.” I bought it because it was a huge parcel of property in a part of town where no one else wanted to live. It cost less than two new cars and looked like a place a writer could afford. The house was a shiplap frame construction of pier and beam. Built around the time I was born, it had enough wood in it to make three houses in 1980. The yard was a fifth of an acre, with a fence and a gravel driveway. It sat on a grassy hill overlooking Austin, at the confluence of the interstate and Texas Highway 290 to Houston. The house was in a loose neighborhood of me and some old black men and women. We had all worked to own the clapboard homes and mobile trailers we lived in. But we were all out of the flow of the locale, just barely hanging on to that American dream. It appeared like wind-whipped, black dirt, Central Texas plains. The grass waved knee-high in the wind, with pop bottles, gum wrappers, and faded plastic hamburger trays half-buried in the sticky black soil. It grew wildly long at the street corners around the occasional fire plug. An elementary school stood abandoned on the hill, with rows of cloudy glass windows like broken teeth in the whistling wind. From where I would dream of rekindling my life, you could hear the tire-tread singing roadways. Jet plane tarmacs at the old airport resounded like kettle drums a couple of miles distant. All day and Providence Street � 91 night. The world passed along here, or stopped to buy a tank of gas, or a night in a motel room, or a plastic swimming pool for the kids. On one side of my little brown house was Ira. He worked daily. His yard was crammed full of salvage. Some he used in his contracting jobs. There were several piles of brick and cinder blocks. Bales of wire, old rusting lawn mowers, torn bags of cement, and parts of an Oldsmobile of some ancient variety were littered about. An old wooden garage was falling down. Stacks of boards with big black spiders in them and flowering weeds up to your head leaned in between. Two junkyard dogs had the run of the place. Their trails would snake along the fence next door to my tiny 800-square foot writer’s home. On the other side was a sparrow-boned woman named Mary, who lived in a two-room shack 12-feet long, maybe 7-feet deep. She was neat as a pin, old as the hills, and seemed to live on...