Story time: The Angriest Man

It has been a week since I first visited Cleburne Cafeteria, and I am haunted by something I saw there. Maybe I always will be.

Cafeteria paterfamilias Nick Mickelis, who came to Houston in 1948 as an immigrant fresh off the Greek island of Patmos, had a rich interior life as a painter. He had real talent. His family has hung some of his works in their grand, whitewashed lobby under its light-filled clerestory—a mini museum of sorts.

In pride of place is a mesmerizing work titled "The Angry Shepherd." Next to it hangs the placard seen below. I was gripped by the very first sentence, which described Patmos shepherd John Kambosos as "a very angry and feared man by all the locals."

It spoke to something mythical, a folklore character well known to children everywhere.

The ogre under the bridge. The "get off my lawn" guy. The man you'd go out of your way to avoid—or, in a perverse spirit of mischief—to provoke with pranks from a safe distance. When I was a girl, we filched plums from such a man who lived up the hill, half terrified at our daring.

So please read the tale set forth in that spirit:

I bristled at the news that John was always mean to the sheep and goats he herded. I was all "Go, goat!" at the revelation that a goat had taken his eye out with a horn during milking. Then horrified with myself to read that the same goat later took John's other eye out, leaving him blind. Then chilled by the revelation that the homemade savouna pipe instrument John is playing in the painting was fashioned from the goatskin of that very animal.

Brutal all around. Anger. Ill will. Violence. Retribution. The kind of tale that grows into a legend, perhaps one that starts out mostly true and then morphs with the retelling into something larger, bleaker, more compelling.

"A year to the day later, that same goat...."

I always loved that moment at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, the classic 1962 John Ford western, when the newspaperman says, "Print the legend." The unspoken part being, because that's what people crave, and what will live on. So I stood rooted in one spot, staring at this shivery fable in a cafeteria lobby, while waiting for my friend to join me for lunch.

I have thought of John Kambosos and his goat many times since. His saga has the pull of dark and cerebral folk fantasy, of the sort that Premee Mohammed or Naomi Novik might write.

And I've pondered another layer of the tale told by the painting's placard: the immigrant story of Nick Mickelis himself, a transplant of just three years when he painted The Angry Shepherd in 1951. He was unhappy, the placard tells us, "extremely depressed and homesick." Probably overworked and stressed out, too, just two years out from the purchase of the landmark business that his family would run for the next 80 years.

It's a tale that echoes down the decades of the city as Houston grew from an overgrown Southern burg (which it felt like when I moved here in the mid-60s, and which the Cleburne Cafeteria still recalls) into one of the most ethnographically diverse cities in the nation.

Powerful stuff. Like so many of us drawn to this exasperating, complicated, endlessly interesting city, Nick hung in there. And the rest is history.

Ours.