Gun Barrel City, TX

75 miles is a long way to go for “Goo-Gone”, but if you love your wife, you have to do these things.

I’ve probably lost you already, so I should explain. “Goo-Gone” is a product that “removes grease, gum, stickers, crayon and tape”. It also has “Citrus Power” and “Scientific Technology”. In spite of that, it’s actually very good, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it also deals with cockroaches and feminine-itch (but don’t try this at home). Anyway, Amy took our bottle (I didn’t ask her what she needed it for …), so we need another. That’s the first part.

The second part is that I needed somewhere to go on a road trip to get out of Dallas. You know how they put up the weather map on TV, and every day it has the names of different local places on it, presumably to appease the natives (ooooh, look, Tiverton’s on the telly). Well, on Thursday, the local weather map showed Gun Barrel City. I’m sure if you’d been here, you’d have had the same urge that I had to find out what a place called Gun Barrel City might look like.

So I set off to Gun Barrel City for Goo-Gone (not going too fast for you, am I?). Since the car has GPS, I went the back roads. A couple of weeks ago, an editorial column in the Telegraph newspaper referred to Dallas as “arcadian”. Even colleagues (one of whose father had sent the clipping to him) who have lived here for many years burst out laughing. Either this guy has no clue what the word “arcadian” means, or he’d been smoking something. My trip took me through the ethnic suburbs of Dallas, and “third-world” is the adjective that springs more readily to my mind. The derelict shopping plazas, closed down restaurants (and I use that word in its most liberal sense), gas stations with several black guys on dilapidated chairs drinking beer, are very reminiscent, for me, of the poorer areas of the Caribbean, or even Los Angeles. (As an aside, there was a recent slight brouhaha about an American journalist who had made negative comments about the President of Brazil’s drinking habits; a Brazilian journalist on the radio made the very good point that there is a certain cultural difference between the two countries, and that we always view different cultures through the lens of our own; I mention this only because the observations of the Telegraph columnist, of an American, and of a Dallas native – and indeed of myself – are likely to be somewhat divergent).

And you definitely know what kind of area you’re in when you come across places of worship named “Lighthouse of Praise Church”, “Fountain of the Living Word Church” and “Church of the Living God, the Pillar and the Ground of the Truth”.

I did find a “real” flea market, unlike last week’s plastic Crap-o-Rama, and bought an old-ish copy of Milles Borne (the French card game – very good, if you’ve never played it). And I found a lot of places that I wouldn’t eat in if you paid me. Oh, and Gun Barrel City (pop. 5,204)? It has a Sonic burger joint, a MacDonalds, a WalMart, a Home Depot … not unlike many other Texan cities, in fact, but I’m sure this was Gun Barrel City. Yes, I’m pretty sure that was it.