SLOW LOUD AND BANGIN’
The text message that pinged into my pocket when I was walking out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport sounded simple. But rolling into MacGregor Park on the southside of Houston 30 minutes later, photographer Mark Riccioni and I quickly realised that finding Les spelt with a dollar sign might be a challenge. Partly because we had driven into what looked and felt like a riot, but mainly because the potent and blinding combination of tyre, marijuana and barbeque smoke filling the air hindered our vision.
Spilling out of the park to frame the adjacent six-lane highway were hundreds of people; all cheering, jeering and live-streaming the health and safety nightmare we were witnessing. People sipped sizzurp (see slang guide on p84) and smoked joints the size of carrots while motorbikes adopted beyond vertical numberplate-kissing wheelies, old boys dripped out in gold straddled trikes and did burnouts at the traffc lights while ‘bally boys’ on quads conducted dusty donuts. But the various-wheeled bikes were just the filler for the main attraction: the cars.
Not giving two hoots to the Highway Code were cars like we’d never seen before – big, lazy luxury American sleds (lots of Buicks, a handful of Mercuries, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles but most notably Cadillacs) with retina-burning candy paint, chopped springs, mismatched grilles and cartoonish protruding chrome wheels. These scythed chariots would weave across the six-lane highway like a fresher stumbling back from the pub, race on the wrong side of the road and block each other in like they were hunting prey – all while ‘popping trunk’ (again, see the slang sheet – you’ll be doing that a lot) to reveal neon-lit epitaphs and free the dirty bass reverberating from their oversized sound systems. Sandwiching the stretch of road were the
