A middle-aged man wakes up bleary-eyed and groggy to the sounds of the neighbor's lawn mower. Why do people insist on doing their yard work so early on the weekend?
It's a Saturday morning in Pearland, Texas, and for Bud Davis, a senior plant manager with a gold watch, it means Lone Star tallboys and Country Legends 97.1 FM in the garage. Maybe washing the truck. Sissy is off with their oldest daughter looking at bridesmaid dresses. When the cat's away, the mouse will watch the Astros on a plasma screen and not wear a shirt.
Most people probably assume that Urban Cowboy's Bud and Sissy decayed into white-trash nothingness after that final bull-riding session at Gilley's. That they turned into Pasadena trailer-park stereotypes full of McDonald's, cheap beer, and occasional law-enforcement interaction.
Bud and Sissy could have just as easily been Rocks Off's parents, except ours didn't go to Gilley's since our mother and father weren't the drinking type, nor were they into country music very much. But fighting and feuding in a trailer before having children and making their way to the big city is the origin story of plenty of people around Houston. A lot of us are only two generations removed from what some elitists would call white trash.
It's been a long strange pearl-snapped trip for Bud and Sissy. After that bull-riding event and the thwarted robbery, the couple retreated back to the trailer for a few weeks to get reacquainted. Not like that... well, not completely.
They decided to buckle down and start a family, which meant reassessing where they were heading. Drunk and full of Waffle House every night wasn't conducive to home life, at least not the one they wanted.
Sissy enrolled in community college that fall to become a nurse. With UTMB right down I-45, it was easy for her to make it through. Bud rose through the ranks at the refinery after Uncle Bob passed away. Aunt Corene got a pretty decent settlement after Bob's accident, and helped Sissy make it through school. Bob would have wanted it that way.
The cowboy bone in Bud never completely went away. He ended up spending one or two nights a week teaching Gilley's folk how ride the mechanical bull, and even started buying older ones and started refurbishing them when he could afford it. Sometimes Sissy and him would make the trek back out to Spur to see his family, but mostly on holidays. As his loved ones died, so did the dream of being some mythical cowboy. The closest he got to bull-riding was the random televised events on ESPN 6 or the annual trips to the rodeo at the Astrodome.
By 1983, Sissy's last year of nursing training, she started getting sick in the mornings, and nine months later Robert Buford Davis came toddling along. With better money coming through the household, the new family started looking for a house, especially after someone tried to break into the trailer one day while Bobby was in his crib and Sissy was in the shower.
Soon they sold the trailer to one of Bud's employees and moved to a subdivision near the border of Friendswood and Pearland near a gas station and a funeral home. It was close enough to the freeway to get to work, and a sight safer than where they were before. Bud kept progressing at the plant, winning several service and safety awards, and Sissy worked in the pre-natal unit of Memorial Southeast Hospital.
