While we lunched on amazing $1 tacos from a Puro Jalisco truck near I-45 and Little York, an amusing scene unfolded in the gas station quickie mart next door. Beebe saw the whole thing when he went in to buy a beer: A tubby middle-aged guy, shirtless but wearing a cowboy hat, walked up to the clerk and asked if he could clean out the car wash for $3, "I'll do a good job, just like last time," he added.
"You are drunk again," said the South Asian clerk. "How many beers have you had today?"
"Only one," said cowboy man.
"How big was this one beer?" asked the clerk.
"It wasn't a 40," said the man. "Come on, lemme clean the carwash."
The clerk refused, but the man was still hanging around when we rolled on, on past a strip-mall pill mill or five and the ramshackle American Legion Post 586 on Parker, which is guarded by a huge tank in forest camo, its turret swiveled toward the trailer park across the street.
We pedaled east down Parker to the headwaters of Fulton, which we joined and headed south across Tidwell and Berry to what used to be that fearsome shopping precinct known as Northline Mall.
Which is now gone; it is now a Meyerland-style open-air market featuring slightly downscale big-box retail on the order of Palais Royal, Beall's, GNC and a generic Chinese buffet. (My dad believes all cheap Chinese food is prepared in one subterranean central kitchen and dispatched to various outlets via secret couriers.)
Northline's shopping experience comes complete with music piped in to the breezeways outside the stores, and this being the Northside barrio, the jams were way cooler than what you would hear in the Land of Meyer; think the James Gang, War and Rare Earth.
Across Crosstimbers, there's a riotous, awesomely retro and quintessentially Ghetto-Houstonian strip mall, starring a Hungry Farmer barbecue, Long John's House of Spinach Kolaches, and a place where you can actually rent a boomin' car stereo.
And there is also one of the last bastions of the once-mighty Soundwaves music store empire. Unlike the Montrose locale, this one actually puts a priority on music; in fact, there was nary a surfboard to be seen. If you're looking for local hip-hop, gospel, zydeco, modern-day blues or soul/R&B, this Soundwaves will hit the spot.
We headed east along Crosstimbers passed the Ice Cream Castles strip club and the T.H.U.G. church (True Heros [Sic] Under God ministry) and then across Hardy, where a shaven-headed mook in a orange candy-painted slab took enough in an interest in us to swerve to the left and swerve to the right and welcome us to that awesomely ghetto-fantabulous northeast side of town. Beebe and I pedaled on to Jensen, a street we had long been dreading but knew we had to scratch off the list.
We turned right on Jensen and headed south towards the Bloody Nickel as a line of dark clouds rolled in off the Gulf.
Check back later for part two.
