If you aren’t familiar with Bishop T.D. Jakes, it could only mean you’re white or, like much of the entertainment industry and American media, generally clueless about the lives of this country’s tens of millions of evangelical Christians. To black Americans, Jakes is an icon–a preaching, teaching, entrepreneurial dynamo. Known…
This was a crazy place, the wild frontier of the gangsta life. You’d never know it now, staring at this empty slab of weathered concrete, overgrown with grass and barely visible from the street. A few people can still tell you what happened here; the rest would probably just as…
He stood on lush grass that was soft as fleece and storybook green. The sun shone a brilliant white, sending waves of gentle warmth through his body, penetrating all the way to his bones. Someone was talking to him, reciting the names of his brothers and sisters and little niece:…
The road to Tennessee Colony passes through rich farmland and acres of spreading trees; it’s some of the prettiest scenery in Texas, but Mark Anthony Larmond has never seen it. Sentenced to 99 years in one of Tennessee Colony’s maximum-security state prison units, the stiffest sentence of the Cleveland Street…
Her name, like most of her life, is forgotten, but her one defining moment is carved into memory: She is the girl who played dead. That moment came in a South Dallas crack house, where she’d been hanging out with four other teen-agers “in the game,” dabbling in the margins…
4/5 Thomas the Tank Engine and his buddy James make stops at the Collin Creek Mall on Saturday at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to distract the kiddies with a free 30-minute musical show featuring life-size replicas of the aforementioned trains as well as our favorite “live costumed…
4/4 Question: What do you get when you mix a serious lack of productivity with a bunch of crazies who make too much money and who take themselves far too seriously? Answer: The Texas Rangers (though the United Nations or any French diplomat would have been acceptable answers). The good…
The husband called first, in a tizzy. While cleaning out a waste bin full of dirty Q-Tips, his wife had come across a used condom. She freaked. Confronted with the desiccated, slightly bloody evidence, he told her he was certain it wasn’t his. And keep the condom, he said. I’m…
Remember the 1998 scissors incident? Michael Irvin and Cowboys lineman Everett McIver got in some sort of fight over a haircut, and McIver ended up with a 2-inch cut on his neck and stitches. The incident was hushed up by Cowboys officials, dismissed as mere horseplay, and with good reason:…
“Control? You think you have control?” Michael Irvin says. “Tell me what you have control of, and I’ll put something in front of you that you’ll realize you don’t have control of that thing.” By the time he hit bottom, his so-called friends, his posse, his peeps, had all slithered…
It hit him when two weeks had gone by and he hadn’t won a single race. “When am I gonna win?” Marlon St. Julien, one of Lone Star Park’s all-time leading jockeys, would ask himself. Then more weeks passed. And more. People started talking. Trainers backed off from hiring him…
They never lie and say “it’s not about the money.” They never pull a Randy Moss and dog it off the line of scrimmage. They don’t spit in umpires’ faces, though they’ve been known to drool on folks. And if they fail a drug test, they can honestly say it…
There is no way to put it delicately: One day, Brittany Pollard found out that she–a distant relative–had once been a he. And for many reasons, it was one revelation too many. Pollard, fresh out of a psychiatric hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown at 13, had learned that the…
What’s it like to end up in prison as a teen-ager? Edwin Debrow Jr., Bill Everett and Brittany Pollard all committed violent crimes that found them on the wrong side of Texas’ get-tough juvenile justice laws. They tell their stories here for the first time–how they got in trouble, how…
From the counter at Mingus’ only bank, the teller could see a tall skinny guy in baggy clothes, hat turned backward, eyes sunken in. His buddy looked just as scruffy, and they were banging on the glass door. “Hey! Let us in! Hey!” they hollered. The teller reached for the…
I have two indelible childhood memories of other people’s weddings. There’s the one where a distant relative, built like a knackwurst and thoroughly schnockered, fell backward off her barstool, hitting the floor with a huge smack and sending her fake pearls and fruity cocktail skittering and splattering across the tiles…
“A Mayor of absolute integrity.” I keep tripping on those words, a blustery little sentence fragment with “Mayor” proudly capitalized, on Laura Miller’s Web site. I was shocked when I first read them, but not in the good way I was back when Miller was putting out some of the…
As a longtime Thoroughbred racing aficionado, I had always turned up my nose at quarter horse racing. As a sport, I thought, it surely suffered; these were inferior creatures, guided by inferior riders, hurtling down a short track with only the simplest of strategies in mind: Run like hell. At…
-It is still there. The Dr Pepper can, the one that was in that precise spot on the end table two weeks earlier. Pat James, mother of twin teen-agers, warned it would be there, and sure enough, it is, deposited by 16-year-old Jessica. Her brother, Trey, isn’t home right now,…
The young man is slumped over, dimly visible in his steel-mesh cage. He mumbles when he speaks, and the words that make it through the metal are plain and crude and soaked in a back-alley drawl. Billy Ray Dennis Jr., sentenced to life in prison for killing a Dallas teacher,…
Editor’s note: It’s impossible to pin down an exact moment, a single violent death or drive-by shooting, but sometime in the late ’80s and early ’90s, something strange and terrible seemed to happen in Texas and across the country. Suddenly, we were afraid of our children. A stream of news…
An Amarillo teen who was convicted of manslaughter for intentionally driving his Cadillac over a 19-year-old punk rocker initially told police the victim had slipped on the ice and fallen under his car, according to written and oral confessions to Amarillo police. Dustin Camp’s statements, taken just hours after the…
