Greetings From America's Secret Capitals

(5 of 13)

Opie would draw up plans on a napkin in the Mueller lunchroom and hand them to a buddy who knew how to draw blueprints. "We wanted a place big enough so that if my mother or Rhonda's ever needed, they could move in with us," says Opie. The house took five years to plan and nine months to build, but to sit in it with them now, to hear them talk about it, you wouldn't know they moved in 2 1/2 years ago. It looks new, feels new. And they look as though they haven't yet got over the fact that it's theirs.

"It's got a ways to go," says Opie as he and the entire family lead a tour of every room, including the unfinished ones on the second floor. They work on it when they can, but Rhonda's in customer services at the First Bank of Boaz, and Opie works a second job, landscaping yards from the time he gets off Mueller until dark. And Sundays, the whole family spends the day at church.

But the house will get done, Opie says. He's a humble man, but as you stand on his back deck with him and look across his acres toward the green rise of sweet gums and oaks in the distance, as you look beyond the flats and through the trees to a sliver of the lake, you can feel his pride. A pride that's there with that fire-hydrant job too. Opie will be on the road somewhere, come across a hydrant and have to get out of the car and go look to see if it's one of his.

"It means something," he says, "if it's something you made yourself."

THE NEW COWBOYS

"To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants." BENITO MUSSOLINI

Say goodbye to Ozzie and Harriet. This is modern dysfunction now. It's Junior with a DO NOT ENTER sign on his door, locked in a room lighted only by the red heat of annihilation. You haven't seen him in days. You're not even sure he's still in there. Last you knew, he was 48 hours into an Internet death match with complete strangers, or his eyes were bugged out of his head from a take-no-prisoners game of Carmageddon or Duke Nuke'em or Redneck Rampage.

It used to be you could bang on the door and tell him he'd never amount to anything if he didn't pull himself away from that garbage, but now you've lost that too.

He knows about Dallas.

He knows that at the top of a downtown skyscraper is a guy whose father once slammed his face into a video-game screen. And now John Romero, 30, who ditched college, has the same birthday as Bill Gates, wears cutoffs to work and cruises there in one of his Ferraris or BMWs, or possibly the yellow Humvee, is a multimillionaire game designer like his three partners. Romero can't put gas in his car now without being hounded for autographs by admiring gamers. Maybe your son even knows Romero has 120 employees, some of them teenagers, making up to $100,000 a year TO PLAY AND DESIGN VIDEO GAMES!

Your boy's not coming back.

The Dallas of Big Oil and Big Football and Big Everything, assassination included, is now the big bloody shoot-'em-up video-game production center of the world.

"We," says Tom Hall, one of Romero's partners, "are the new cowboys."