Boom Town

I have come to believe, after my time there, that Oklahoma City is one of the great weirdo cities of the world—as strange, in its way, as Venice or Dubai or Versailles or Pyongyang. It is worth paying attention to, on its own terms, independent of any news cycle, strictly for the improbability of what exists there, all the time, every day. It is a

Many of the city’s neighborhoods lack sidewalks, intentionally, as a symbol of status, because walking was considered to be outmoded, primitive, impoverished, a little sad, an activity that might even distract the cars, or offend them. You will hear, while you are here, two basic axioms about driving in OKC, each of which seems to violate the laws

Officer Burnett’s rescuer would have come running out of the county courthouse, a stately New Deal monolith with civic quotes carved onto its limestone face. (HE WHO HAS MOST ZEAL AND ABILITY TO PROMOTE PUBLIC FELICITY, LET HIM BE THE SERVANT OF THE PUBLIC.) Red Kelley’s gigantic pool of blood would have gushed out of him and—as his eyes glazed ove

He had been a lawman once, a deputy marshal in Colorado, not to mention the man who killed the man who killed motherfucking Jesse James, and he believed that he deserved more respect. This injustice would not stand. Kelley promised his underworld friends that he would take revenge, as soon as he possibly could, on the Oklahoma City police.

Red Kelley fit right in. He was angry, petty, and violent. He had big ears and about three mustaches’ worth of mustache.

but I could hardly pay attention to what he was saying because the beard, up close, was overwhelming, a real ninety-ninth-percentile super-mammalian face bush.

As soon as I got near Oklahoma City, I felt a mysterious inner needle beginning to vibrate—a needle that, in all of my journalistic wanderings, I had never noticed before. I wasn’t sure what it measured, or if it measured anything at all. But there it was, moving. For the next several years, I followed the vibrations of that needle wherever they ha

He fired. Boom. Kelley died in a gigantic pool of blood just off of First Street. This incident—along with many others more or less like it—titillated local newspaper readers for weeks. Oklahoma City police officer Joe Burnett was now the killer of the killer of the killer of Jesse James.

The future it hurls itself into is never the future it was fantasizing about. And so it hurls itself again. This makes the present feel like history. OKC is a place where time does not work properly: it crawls, then lurches forward, then piles up on itself, then pauses, then slides backward, then repeats itself, then freezes, then stumbles forward