When it comes to friendships, high school can be arbitrary. Especially for people like me, whose first day of ninth grade was their first day of school in Texas, period, the clique you end up in is catch as catch-can.
Which is why I was not high school friends with Joe De la Fuente. We were in the same grade at Strake Jesuit in a class of 200 or fewer, but barely spoke in our four years together in what is now Chinatown. Part of it was because one of my good friends regarded him as an intellectual nemesis dating back to a junior high feud, and another part of it was because, as I only found out about a year ago, another of my friends, a guy in the grade ahead of us, had bullied him, until Joe flipped the script and beat his ass. (Never heard that story from my older HS friend, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he would advertise, and in retrospect, that is a friendship I’d like to take back. But….he had a car.)
Anyway, Joe is a success story of our graduating class — a powerhouse attorney in Austin, married to a minister, with at least two awesome kids (set me straight if I have that number wrong, Joe, or if you are uncertain of their parentage) and a churchgoer. Not a “Christian,” mind you, but what my friend Jeff calls “a Jesus man” who walks the walk, working tirelessly to help storm victims in times of need and who adheres to a strict code of ethics in his highly successful law practice.
And tonight he blessed me with a very precious gift.
Pictures of doors.
Pictures of doors with stickers on them. These were the doors to his room and his closet. What was on the face of the sticker did not matter.
“My strategy was pretty simple: if it had adhesive on the back, it went on the door.”
That lack of editing acumen means a lot because there is now, as he says, “a metric shit-ton of Houston history on there.” And anthropology. And nostalgia.
Y basta ya (“enough already,” for the Spanish-challenged) of my yakkin’. Let’s look at these doors.
Okay here, we have a salute to one loyal reader’s dad — ‘sup Mark? — and a legendary Bellaire record shop. Also an assortment of Wacky Packages Joe remembers buying at the Sunny’s corner store in Sharpstown, where he grew up. (Man, that was a short-lived mania of mine…Stuff like Wacky Packages and Mad magazine were vital in shaping the minds of young American cynics from the 1950s up through the early ‘80s at least.)
Don’t really recall that iteration of Houston Dynamos….
Ah man, that Louisiana World Exposition — I owe all of y’all a post about that. Dad and I unintentionally snuck in to that event in August of ‘84 and got to see the Neville Brothers for free on a night that was very poignant for both of us.
Aw lawd, Swatch watches, the most coveted fashion item of all, circa 1986. My first girlfriend gave me one with a diamond chip at nine o’ clock, two ruby chips at ten, three emeralds at 11, and four sapphires at midnight. She was rich. (Even with all that bling, that Swatch probably set her parents back $30, but I felt like a Cock-Dawg Daddy of the Walk with that gem-encrusted plastic timepiece strapped to my wrist.)
Joe’s dad would bring him stickers from awl patch bidness trips — hence the chopper and natural born Scotsman placards, and I guess that tartan peace sign (North Sea oil, laddies and lassies).
Moving on to the top half of door number one:
There was a time when White Houstonians of a certain age broke down into warring tribes of who was into KLOL or who was into 97 Rock…the latter was a little more metal and a little more appealing to recent transplants, while KLOL was the heritage station and a little heavier on the ballads. 97 Rock was for Trans Ams, KLOL for Camaros….To my mind, neither was a very good rock station by 1985, but that’s another story….We see the rise of MADD, and the sense of grievance native Houstonians felt amid the hordes of Rust Belters moving to town and mocking our accents….The long tail of the Deep Throat phenomenon is evidenced by the “Hi-Vac Sucks” sticker and the red-lipped Guzzler Manufacturing Inc. (really, that’s the name) emblem Joe evidently loved so much he plastered it on there twice in close proximity.
Oh and “Think Clean: Burn Coal.” Wow.
Back to blow off more of your doors later this week.
Great to see a time capsule of what I missed when I moved to Nashville, now the self-proclaimed "IT CITY" Full of it, if you ask me or sweet spouse Melanie!
Great memories
Thanks for the flashback