JJ on Why the Bounders Still Rule

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Today, my friend Cate Poe, of Connecting with Cate, posted about street art in San Miguel de Allende, (where she lives with a Texan & too many currently beige walls) & about street art by women across the world.

And my thoughts went immediately to three black & white photographs I retrieved from the space once in Jean & Jack's  house once occupied by my Omega Son Sam.

For many years & in many spaces, these photographs resided on the walls of where I lived.  In the rooms of places I lived alone, in the rooms of places I shared, in the rooms I tried to create for my sons to call home.

And then they ended up in Sam’s space, along with my paintings that dated from long before Jaki Jean thought about children, or sons. 

When Sam moved out to begin his own life & write his own text, he took those paintings with him.  Except for one, which I asked him to leave.

The why of that is another story, not for this moment.

He did not take the black & white photos of Houston inner-city graffiti.

I remember driving by the brick fence on which that graffiti text was drawn & written when I was an inner city dweller, living in a quadraplex on Stanford Street.  I remember how it absorbed me, how I wondered who created it, what did it signify, why this particular place.  

I must have discussed it too many times at family dinners with my parents & siblings.

Because one day, for my birthday or perhaps for Christmas, I received three 8x10 black & white photos of the art work that so intrigued me, courtesy of my sister Janet.

The images – an outline of an androgynous human body, the declaration The Bounders Rule, were not exclusive to the corner I passed on the way from my apartment on Stanford Street & Richmond Avenue to travel across downtown to the Spanish Village on Almeda for margaritas & conversation.

Each trip, to Spanish Village & from Spanish Village, those images intrigued & delighted me.

Over the years I have heard two different stories about the origin of these images.  The Bounders were a skateboarding street gang, the Bounders were a group of Bellaire High School students who traveled across the inner city, outlining their bodies on public buildings, public places, public streets.  And pronouncing that the Bounders ruled.

I heard the story about the skateboard gang from a fellow inner city dweller.  I heard the story about the Bellaire High School kids from a graduate, who claimed to be part of the rebellious & daring group.

One of the body outlines was on an overpass over the Southwest Freeway.  She had a plausible explanation for how that was accomplished, so my instinct was to believe she had been a Bounder.

Not long after Sam was born, I met a group of college students who had graduated from Bellaire with my source & they firmly denounced her claim.

Jaki, even in high school, she fabricated adventures.

During the time I was friends with my source, ten years my junior, she told me many plausible stories. 

About living in Greece for a year, about leaving her parents’ home at 18 to escape her father’s control, about the pressures of growing up Catholic, about an abortion she had before moving to Washington, DC, another pregnancy scare while we were sharing an apartment on Virginia Avenue next to the State Department, a job with CBS, a lump in her breast, a scheduled surgery to remove the lump.

We were polar opposites politically, absolute soul mates when it came to literature, text  & children.  She sent me a subscription to William F. Buckley’s The National Review & gleefully renewed it for years.  She once donated money to the Republican National Committee in my name.

It took me decades to get the elephants to remove this donkey from their mailing lists. 

Only during the 2008 election did I finally convince them they were not going to win me over.  William F. Buckley aside.  My love affair with him was with his voice, his words, his command of the English language.

Not his conservatism.

She was brilliant, articulate, kind.  And a wonderful writer.

Much later, after the day her mother was due to come to D.C. for her surgery, the day she took my son Nicholas to the Air & Space Museum for the nth time, the day she cleaned the apartment, destroyed all her correspondence, drank a fifth of gin & consumed all of Nick’s allergy medication, all her fiance’s pain medication & threw herself into the Potomac, I learned that she did, indeed, fabricate adventures.

She also took my half of the rent & the phone bill, but did not pay her half.  While she was recovering from her suicide attempt, I was served with eviction papers.  I cannot count the number of times that the phone was disconnected & I believed every fabricated story she told me.

Of course, in retrospect, there were signs.  Some we recognized, some we allowed her to explain away.  Too many ignored when we tried to talk to her family.

She healed, her fiancé paid all her debts, worked closely with her doctors.    They got married quietly, he found her a job writing a newsletter from home, they had a son.

She sent me a wonderful crib mobile that played classical music when Sam was born.

She was not a Bounder, but she was, & is, a survivor.

The wall that once displayed the Bounders declaration has long since been whitewashed clean. 

Retrieving the Bounder graffiti from Sam’s former space a few weeks ago, I brought them downstairs & told my sister Janet that I wanted to reframe them, with denim mats to match the quilt she made me.

The photos are still in the Lucite frames from so many decades ago. 

When I look at them, I remember that brilliant Bounder wannabe & how she conquered her demons, most of which were surely caused by a chemical imbalance.

And when I look at the Bounder photos,   I also remember what it was to be a young woman living in the inner city surrounded by friends, art, intelligence, voice.  And wonder.

Thank you, Cate, for reminding me of who I was & still am at heart.  And who I can be.

Bounders still rule.

Note:  The original photographs are much finer than the pictures I took through the Lucite frames & cropped for this Blog.  My apologies to my sister.