DALLAS LETTER:In the shadow of the soap opera's signature skyscrapers, a lively alternative zone resists efforts to clean it up
SKULLS ARE never far from you anywhere in Texas’s third city. A few blocks from the skyscrapers you’ll find the bleached bones of goats or cattle in crude artworks nailed to the walls of dark bars in Deep Ellum.
In the rundown warehouse sector where blues singers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly in the 1920s paved the way for end-of-century punk bands, a tattooed artist shows a bonehead etched on the back of his hand.
Startlingly, it smirks from the centre of a Celtic cross.
Follow Commerce Street down to the walls of Fair Park, an art deco campus that was built in 1936 for the Texas Centennial Exhibition and site of the annual state fair: animal skulls are intricately inlaid in the brickwork there too.
The José Guadalupe Posada exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art sheds light on such imagery: a prescient Mexican modernist, Posada drew satirical illustrations for late 19th- and early 20th-century broadsheets and pamphlets.
They mainly feature cheery skeletons in top hats, wearing sombreros, going to Confession and riding bone-shaking bicycles.
Peasant life across the border is amusingly lived at a loose end by his stylised skeletons as they eat food, wear clothes, play guitars and congregate on street corners.
These are the parched bones of desert carcasses given a second lease of life – Posada’s black ink is their resurrecting blood.
“I love this city,” says Leigh, a commercial photographer.
“It has a great seething underbelly, perhaps because all the wusses and lightweights take the easy option and get the hell out.
“This leaves the hard core to put up a fight.”
He is standing in Reno’s bar, a Deep Ellum institution, surrounded by tough biker guys drinking alone.
Every few minutes, a Harley the size of a European smartcar roars up outside, the raw baritone reverberations a signal of importance in the pecking order.
“The authorities tried to clean up Deep Ellum years ago.
“Why? Well, because they just didn’t like it,” says Leigh defiantly.
“They nearly succeeded in driving out the bars – but not the tattoo joints.”
A couple of hundred yards away, a late-night parlour plies its trade, its stubborn presence as indelible as its ink.
Inside, a primitive Texan beauty in cowgirl boots winces in weird nirvana as the needle scrapes a red death skull on her flesh.
The tattoo-joint owner tries to entice in a passerby whose arm is already somewhere between a walking mural and a graphic novel.
“You have space for one more?” he mouths, his southern smile almost convincing.
Deep Ellum has waxed and waned with the years, along with its name for crime. Its association with impoverished black singers and a nascent blues scene is historical. Sure, in St Pete’s Dancing Marlin, you might find a 10-gallon-hatted delusionist using a guitar as a crutch as he croaks out sounds. And over the road in Adair’s, there’s a vaguely plausible band about to engage in the forced sincerity of a soundcheck.
But there is more going on in Deep Ellum than mere entertainment – it’s a place where some people belong.
The line of motorbikes parked in the back lane by Reno’s has built up. Their riders are kings of some vague counterculture. These are not adolescents or youthful rebels; they are not imitators.
In their late 40s and early 50s, they remove helmets and night glasses and hang them purposefully on their handlebars: mess with these at your peril. Inside it’s Red Stripe and raucous music.
Nothing much to do with Texan oil or cattle or cotton.
In recent years, frat kids were drawn by the murky deadbeat allure. Some were targeted by drug pushers and gangs.
Tonight a bouncer curbs a college kid trying to climb up on the veranda with his beer.
Night falls down on Deep Ellum. The music grinds to a halt. The low skyline stoops, a stone’s throw from the glass towers familiar from Dallas’s famed soap opera.
The extraordinarily named Psycho Gym closed hours ago, but the pugnacious skinhead on its sign seems to swing in the breeze as the last biker kickstarts his steed and rides off home.