Big Taix

I come from a closed casket family. At our funerals, we look at a big framed photo of the departed. We listen to a preacher (who probably never even met the dead) talk through details of their life. And if it’s a Plocek funeral, we hope the preacher pronounces the name somewhat correctly. Then we go eat — or at least I think we do. I’m having trouble remembering what comes after.

Open caskets, they say, help with closure. I had a friend die from pneumonia (and maybe something else) in our mid 20s, and I saw his body in the casket. Another buddy leaned over and slipped some weed into his jacket — one last toke for the ride home — and our friend was dead. We saw it. We felt it.

I didn’t expect an art show devoted to Taix, the beloved Echo Park restaurant that closed in March, to get me thinking about dead friends and family. But grief has a way of surprising you.

Gallery Luisotti’s “1911 Sunset Boulevard” features work from six contemporary artists, all focused on the end of the restaurant’s 99-year history. Maxfield Hegedus’s photos are an easy fave, capturing the vivid color palettes of the restaurant’s various rooms. With the exception of one guy at the bar, the rooms in the photos are empty, locked in time right at the end. Some of those shots accompanied Gracie Hadland’s story “The Sun Sets on Taix,” which was published a few months after the restaurant shut down. It was one of many encomia written about the place. So many people have memories of Taix.

I hung out at Taix maybe a half dozen times, but I can’t compete with my friend Erin, who visited the gallery show with me. Not only did Erin and her husband have their first date at Taix, they got married at Taix. During the restaurant’s final weekend, they donned their wedding clothes again and braved the crowds, and there indeed were crowds. The furniture went up for auction, and Erin bought five tables, never mind that she didn’t have space for them. She’ll figure something out. 

We found Gallery Luisotti on the 10th floor of the Wurlitzer Building downtown. The space had a mixed-use feeling, with dividers barely hiding desks and other equipment. On one wall was a series of black-and-white photos of urban blight, and I initially assumed they weren’t part of the show. Then I learned the gallery had commissioned Arturo Soto to shoot the Taix lot after the demolition, and that’s when I understood the restaurant — the tables, the chairs, the carpet, the fixtures, the walls, everything — was gone. That’s when nostalgia turned into loss.

My dad died last November. It was a long time coming, and I’d already been mourning him for years. When I was a kid, he’d been a big man, a big Texan, but he had lost so much weight by the end. He became frail, and I was the one hugging him instead of the other way around. 

He spent most of his last days sitting in a chair in the living room of my parents’ house in Cedar Park, near Austin. Then he died, and the chair was still there, but it didn’t feel empty, as if he’d just gone to the bathroom or something. The house was quiet without his oxygen machines going, but there was the sense they could be turned back on.

We didn’t have an open casket. We didn’t even have a funeral. We cremated my dad, and a month later we moved my mom to another state. My dad left behind an X on a map of Padre Island, so we have the where, but we still haven’t figured out when we’ll spread the ashes.

I went back to Cedar Park in January to close up the house, and that included an errand as Texas as Texas gets: disposing of a couple rusted rifles hidden in the garage. That’s when the living room was empty. The chair wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. I lumbered around and cried the biggest cry since he died. He was gone.

This was supposed to be an art review, and now we’ve wound up here. How lugubrious. Sharing all this does make me feel lighter, though. Endorphins, dopamine, something else. It seems like I’m asking you all to carry a little of the weight. There are many of you, and you each can handle a little.

I know you can. 

I can carry a little of yours too.