Texas Heat Wave, July 2004

Disclaimer: This chronicle happened directly after coming back from 7 weeks of basic training then 3 months of tech training in the military. I hadn’t seen an attractive female in about that long, and I had just gotten all of my freedoms back. I was… intense at the time. Also, I had just turned 20, and was still invincibly stupid. Don’t judge me bro!

Me and 3 friends (Shawn, Nick, and Aaron) decided one July (in 2004) to go to a huge state-wide carshow called “Texas Heat Wave.” It was hosted in Austin and my friend Shawn was willing to drive us down. Shawn’s mother worked in the hotel field and got us a room at the downtown La Quinta for free. This trip practically planned itself! On the road down we discussed what we were going to do, and having been to Austin several times (where the other guys hadn’t been at all) I was the main source of information. “We’ve got to do two things for certain; #1, take a ride over to west Austin and visit my favorite road, Lime Creek, and #2, hit up 6th street at night. All else is negotiable.” I told the boys. They all agreed and soon enough, we were in Austin.

We checked into out La Quinta and plopped our bags on the beds, then went straight out to hook up with Shawn’s friends. We drove up to a ratty roach motel-esque place on the side of 35 and I started to smell burning rubber immediately. As we pulled around the side, we saw that a lot of the show cars that were to be in the show were holed up here for the weekend. We also saw that many of them were down off of their trailers, doing massive burnouts. They were slowly making a circuit around the hotel stopping by people they knew, chatting, drinking beer and then doing more burnouts. We went on the slow circuit, parked and walked inside the U shaped structure of the motel. More people! There had to be ten people here for every room at that motel. Most of them were already stumbling drunk and probably 1/3 of them had video cameras out and were drunkenly laughing at peoples’ antics. We met up with Shawn’s friends (Josh, Garret, Ross and Adrian) whom I’d never met before, and we started drinking. They had rented a room at that motel (as they explained it) almost 8 months before and had just barely gotten the reservation. Apparently this was one of the hotels where a lot of the car show attendants liked to be during Texas Heat Wave. We walked over to a Bennigans (I believe) and ate, then walked back to the motel. Shawn gave me his video camera with the instructions “don’t break it, and bring me back some boobs.” I had gotten enough beers in me to make this a reality I thought, and agreed to his solemn instructions.

Walking around the motel, I tried to get some (read: all) of the girls I came across to show me T/A. It worked several times and I started to get on a roll. I walked up to a huge lifted truck with a gorgeous dancing latina girl in it. I started chanting “show your tits” and almost immediately the entire crowd joined in. She acquiesced, and I got some pretty good footage. She let the foaming masses grab at her for a while, then had her driver move along. Crazy, I wasn’t used to having that kind of authority with my voice, it must have been the booze. I showed the footage to my boys (who were much further away from the truck than I) and we decide to hit up 6th street.

(Insert unremembered 6th street antics here) Apparently I am a ladies’ man when I get wasted, because the guys reported the next day that I was chatting up some hotties all night. Boo for blackouts.

The next morning we awoke and went to the carshow that everyone was making such a big deal about. It was by far the biggest carshow I’ve ever seen, with thousands of entered cars and even more people coming to see them, but it was all pretty uninteresting. Lots of caddies on hydraulics, lowriders, and general Mexican filth. There was a section of the car show that housed a few cool imports, and a section that had some of the biggest lifted trucks I’ve ever laid eyes on in real life. They were literally 80% the size of a monster truck, and somehow street legal. We got bored (and entirely hot, it was probably 107 that day.) and went from there to go visit the famed Lime Creek road. I’d been on it only twice before, once in a friends’ souped up RX7, and the next in my 240sx, both were very fun and memorable experiences. The first time I went, I saw an older RX7 flip. I relayed this to Shawn, who was driving and owned a two door Honda Accord and bid him be careful. We turned onto Lime Creek and started tackling the dragon. Shawn’s car was not built for this kind of abuse. He still had stock brakes and suspension, and a lot of weight in passengers. We went in on a decreasing radius right hand corner, and a truck coming the opposite way met us hugging the inside of his lane. Shawn under-steered and we made contact with the rear bumper of the old truck with his front driver side headlight and fender. The damage was negligible to the truck, and Shawn’s car was still functional, if a bit messed up looking.

Seeking relief and comfort we stopped by my older sister Steph’s house and she cooked us up some grub over hearing our tale of the weekend thus far. As we got to the car crash part, she bid us take her outside to see the Accord. In a moment of coincidence and irony, as soon as we got to the Accord we heard a loud bang and looked down the street to see that someone had just crashed! After making sure no one was hurt, we all went in to eat.

As the sun set, we rolled toward the highway-side motel and into one of the craziest nights of morass and carnage that I’ve been subject to. Somehow even more people had descended upon the little place, and even more show cars were there. We went into the middle of the motel where the pool was to find a congregation of people surrounding the pool. With cameras, beer and shocked faces the crowd had to number around 300. We pushed our way through the masses to get at what everyone was so slack-jawed about, only to find that Shawn’s friend (I think his name was Ross) eating out his girlfriend Adrian right there, her on the side of the pool, him standing in it. They were just finishing up when we got there, and our eyes had to be as big as saucers when we greeted them, because they just looked at us and laughed. What the hell. There was plenty of night left, give me a beer.

Shawn wielded the video camera this night, and after I had gotten a few beers in me, my inner superhero “Drunk Chuck tm” arose. I got several girls to pose for some photos with me (with their shirts off) and started feeling like the entire crowd here was gathering some sort of raucous, wildly inhibition-free energy. I was toying with letting it sweep me away when I saw that same hot latina girl from the first night we were here. She was dancing again, and called me over when she saw me. Off came the top, and onto her boobs went my hands. A few minutes later I found my party again. Chagrinned that Shawn hadn’t gotten that bit on film I told him to video me and nick and watch what we were about to do. People had been tipping her as a stripper and her g-string was starting to get laden with singles. After Nick and I fought our way to her again, I looked back at Shawn’s camera and winked. Nick, having been briefed on our caper, was laughing incessantly as I reached up and grabbed a handful of latin softness, then grabbed a bill from her undergarments, just for the trouble. Nick followed suit.

Then the night dialed the insanity to 11.

Cops showed up. There were about 5 squad cars at first, and they tried to pull over some of the burn-out cars, but the energy of the night had taken on a viscous tone. People booed. The cops got scared and started maceing people that got close to them, hands on their guns. They then got back in their cars to leave. (presumably to get backup.) I don’t know who threw the first beer bottle, but who ever that was had tapped something ugly in everyone’s heart. Someone was brave enough to light off one of those bottle-rocket batteries (the kind that go on for like 2 minutes shooting) and set it on a cop’s car. Another ran up and pissed on one of the cruisers. They were nearly blocked in by all the people shouting and flipping them off. They muscled through the crowd fearing for their lives and the crowd started cheering as they left the scene. What in the hell is going on?

I was beginning to wonder if my lungs were being coated in rubber from all the burnouts we were watching when we saw and heard a helicopter above. At some point in the night, the beat cops had upgraded from little mace canisters to actual tear-gas. They all came to the little motel en force, probably twenty patrol cars with more on the way. I don’t know how they first started spreading the gas, from hand thrown canisters or some kind of gun, as accounts wildly varied, but it started getting to the people pretty badly. I had just finished up basic training for the Air Force, where you are required to be gassed, to know what you are in for if the enemy uses it on you. Let me tell you, either the cops got some kind of pussy gas or I was just used to it, because it was barely making me cough and cry. The crowd of people started going inward into our little compound of a motel to get away from the gas, and they were pissed. People started trying to rip the coke machines out of the ground to throw them in the pool. They failed as the gas encroached on the outer areas. They moved to the next thing they saw, the massive grill. Into the pool it went, along with every table and piece of lawn furniture around the motel’s inner area. “EVERYONE NOT IN A ROOM IS GOING TO JAIL.” Came a booming voice from the helicopter. The crowd, no longer dispersed along the outside of the motel, is what I consider a mob. They flipped off the ‘ghetto bird’ hovering over us and some idiots even thought they could throw beer bottles high enough to hit it. Uniforms then started throwing canisters of gas into the mob and their spirit broke. Everyone started for their rooms, and soon enough, no one cared if it was their room, a friends’ room, or even a complete stranger. I, being about the only one of us who could still see (since a can of gas landed right next to me and my friends) shuffled us into the nearest open room we could find. We thanked the man for his hospitality, and he offered us some beer. We took it, and started talking excitedly about what craziness each one of us had seen. Shawn got some pretty good footage of the cops coming in on us. We drank and told stories for an hour or so until we couldn’t hear the bustling about of the police. Finished with that crazy ass place, but not with the night, the boys and I packed up and went to 6th street once more.

By this time I was well and good hammered. Drunk Chuck tm was in full force. My friends found that their new favorite super hero worked best with a beer in hand, and I was never found wanting for one. Nick spotted her first. A tall blonde with a body that made my eyes hurt. Or was that still the tear gas? Nick lined me up and pointed her out. He said “Go get her, Chuck.” Off I went. She was on the phone when I reached her, and she was with a really fat chick. I made eye contact with her and gave her what I hoped was my most dashing grin. Her eyes lit up and a smile crept across her face. As she was finishing up her conversation I asked for their names from the land-whale. Her name was Shawn, and Whaley’s name stayed Whaley in my head. (I blurted it out later in the conversation but played it off like I thought her name was Bailey. Smooooth.) She hung up and we chatted about Austin, the night life, and finally came around to what each of us were doing here. I told her we were in town for the carshow, and she told me that she lived here, but was actually a model at the carshow. Holy cow, Drunk Chuck tm, you are chatting up an honest-to-goodness carshow model. Awesome. I asked for her number, and got it, then she told me to come find her tomorrow at the show. I promised I would and went back to the slack-jawed friends (who had been creeper-style videoing the whole thing) as a victor. We went back to the La Quinta and after some pre-sleep cavorting and antics, went to bed.

Sunday we got a bit of a late start. Tear gas and mob-mentality apparently takes it out of you. After noticing that Shawn’s brakes were toasted from Lime Creek, we dropped by an Auto Zone and did a brake job there in the parking lot. We arrived at the carshow with a renewed sense of purpose, we were going to see Shawn! (the hot, blonde model, not the beaded fat football player of a friend) I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t have the ability to ‘use the Drunk, Luke’ since I hadn’t had anything to drink, and she’d see me as the dork I saw myself as. I battered the thought out of my head with a nice big stem of machismo. Fake confidence. I’d have to let it out soon or I’d start pouring liquid arrogance everywhere I went. As the day went on, it started to rain, limiting our movements around the massive grounds that held the carshow. My chest puffed out, I was getting more and more cavalier with cat-calling to random people. This isn’t good, If I come in hot and audacious to Shawn, she might be put off. I shrugged, instantly thinking my sheer pulchritude would win the day.

We finally found her, in a nearly empty arena. There was a newer Lambo and a type of Lotus that I didn’t immediately recognize that she and an equally exquisite brunette were posing by. Without preamble, we walked right over to them (apparently interrupting a professional photo shoot) and she shrilled my name (she remembered my name?? wow…) and came bouncing over to give me a hug on her 7 inch platforms, wearing naught but a small bikini top and tiny, tight spandex shorts. Shawn had left the video camera at the room, as we’d forgotten to charge the insipid thing the night previous, but he still had brought his holdout digital camera. She beckoned me over to the cars and instructed fatShawn to snap a few of us. Both girls crowded around me (both unnervingly taller than me, in those heels) and the arrogance was a narcotic effluvium as it flowed out of me. I grabbed her ass and winked at the camera, she merely responded by further pressing her bust against me and giggling. I had broken through, and channeled Drunk Chuck tm through sheer force of confidence and determination. I asked what she was doing later and she said her manager was taking them to dinner but we could hang out later. She had to get back to the shoot, but she laid a peck on my cheek as we left. The feeling as I walked away was somehow even more alien than the night before with the mob threatening violence against the police. I… Won the day, I guess. Now for the night.

From a Chuy’s in downtown I called her around the time she said she was getting out from dinner, and she gave us the ‘too tired’ excuse. I murmured that I saw that one coming, and she sounded genuinely sorry as she rebuffed me. She said that she was coming to Hot Import Nights in Dallas soon, and that she had my number. She’d call me then and we could hang out. We went home the next morning, full of the energy of just having made an amazing story.

The account two months later when she DID come to HIN and she DID call me, is another adventure all by itself.