Where They're From Embarrassment of Riches
Attending Westlake High meant never having to apologize for being wealthy or successful. And if other towns hated us, it surely wasn’t our fault.
BY DEFINITION, high school kids are idiots. If you’ve but one lonely, honest bone in all of your body, you’ll admit that there was no other time in life when the disparity was greater between what you thought you knew and what you actually did know. Add to that the abject insecurity of untamable adolescence, the body and soul itching to lay claim to their place in the world but possessing none of the know-how to do so, and the result is an idiot. A high school kid is a misfit intent on masking that zit-ridden impotence behind a two-beer buzz and the right kind of car, clothes, and music—played as loudly as your parents and the cops will allow. One of the most beautiful things about growing up is that with sufficient distance, you can see clearly the central mystery of those awful, awkward years: In the attempt to forge your own identity, you did everything you could to fit in.
The generalizations become specifics when you talk about individual schools. I graduated from Westlake High School in 1985, and for us, the beer was big-mouthed bottles of Mickey’s malt liquor, the cars were Trans Ams, the clothes were Polo, and the music was Van Halen. At least that was the dream. Room was left for negotiation. You could drive a pickup with a tall enough lift kit, in which case you could also get away with playing Hank Williams Jr. And the variety of beer was in fact secondary to the ability to buy it at all, either by use of a fake driver’s license or, in my own case, a bushy set of age-camouflaging sideburns. (The legal drinking age back then was, after all, only nineteen.) But at Westlake, even if your parents wouldn’t spring for Ralph Lauren, you could still work your way into the in crowd by adopting the right attitude. That meant believing, with every ounce of your being, that all of life was a struggle pitting us against them. We were the Proud, the Persecuted, the Mighty Westlake Chaparrals.
We were in fact off by ourselves in the hills west of Austin, a suburb isolated by more than just geography. There were also the little twin matters of income and race. Westlake High was rightly regarded as a white-flight school, and of our 1,500 students, barely a handful could be described as being “of color.” Though the Westlake community existed long before public-school integration, the area mushroomed after busing hit Austin in 1980. And because of its natural beauty—high rolling hills thick with cedar and hackberry, bordered on the north by the Colorado River and on the southwest by the Barton Creek Greenbelt—most of the families who could afford to move in were headed by doctors and lawyers and well-heeled businessmen. That seemed to sit poorly with nearly everyone we encountered, be it the larger Austin schools, who we assumed were envious of our lofty perch above town, or the schools we competed against from smaller, outlying areas. It didn’t help that we acknowledged those towns only when we played them in sports or that Westlake was becoming accustomed to the athletic success for which it is now best known.
But we Chaps considered those to be the other guys’ problems, and unaware that anything we might be doing was making matters worse, we acted accordingly. I remember a basketball game we played my junior year in Leander, a small farming community about twenty miles northwest of Austin. It was a typical contest, heated on the court and in the stands, and Westlake won. Afterward, some rawboned farm boys followed me and a couple of friends from the gym to the parking lot. When we got to my car, a dingy gray Capri with the driver’s side door smashed in—my own jacked-up Toyota four-by-four was still a year off—the Leander students looked at me with elated disgust.
“Hey, rich boy,” one said. “Where’s your Trans Am?”
“Your mama is washing it,” I replied as I opened my door.
By the standard of the Warriors-caliber brawls our schools would have in that parking lot a year later, I’d have to guess that the farm boy was feeling charitable that evening. Rather than holding me down and slamming the car door on my head, he picked me up, sat me in the Capri, and walked off with his buddies. Crisis averted. The magic of Westlake.
But the truly amazing part didn’t occur until the next day, when I was summoned to the principal’s office. Nothing unusual about that; I was there almost as often as the principal’s secretary. The administrative staff gathered around, as they typically did, to ask what I’d done this time. Only on this occasion, they already knew. “Tell us what you said last night to that guy in the parking lot after the game,” one of them said. So I told them, anticipating more d-hall hours added to what I already owed. But everyone just laughed. “Way to stand up for the school,” someone said. One of them pumped her fist in the air. Then they sent me back to class.
That was Westlake or, as the bumper stickers sold by the booster club read, “The Pride of the Hills.”
MY DAD DID NOT like Westlake even one little bit. He was a Carter-Mondale-Ferraro man, a way-left-leaning Episcopal priest who had a special facial expression he saved for when the subject of my high school came up. It resembled the faces of his Southern Baptist counterparts when they saw two dudes French-kissing. My dad didn’t feel at home in Westlake, and at bottom he had good reason. There weren’t many people living there on a preacher’s salary unless they ran a church in the area. That we could afford to live in Westlake at all was a testament to my mom’s good business sense and the fact that both my parents worked. The Rev, as I liked to call my dad, taught at a seminary and ran a counseling practice, helping people through divorce and death and all manner of spiritual and emotional upheaval. My mom was a full-time nurse who worked nights at the state hospital. By day she sought bargains, her most notable find being a four-bedroom house in Westlake that she and my dad bought for a song and moved me and my two younger brothers into in 1978. But as my dad frequently pointed out, this was before Austin started busing kids across town. He said that if he’d seen the white-flight flood coming, we would have stayed put in North Austin. There was an implication in the move he could never abide.
But it was the materialism he perceived that rankled him most. He and my mom both grew up in families that weren’t alerted to the end of the Depression as early as the rest of the country. My dad’s dad died in 1943, when the Rev was just nine, and the old man’s $8,000 life insurance policy had barely covered his hospital bills. When my dad’s mom was forced to shift from housewife to breadwinner, her eighth-grade education wasn’t much help, and their home in Charlotte, North Carolina, remained simpler than simple. My mom grew up in Ellenwood, Kansas, a small farm town that I’ve never heard mentioned outside our family. Her father, my granddad Ralph, lived to be 78, residing until the end in the same log cabin where he raised my mother, across a dirt driveway from the wheat fields he worked but never dreamed of owning. As I recall from childhood trips to Kansas, their extravagances ran to doilies in the cabin and a welding torch in the barn.
Strangely enough, for decades Westlake’s social standing had not been too different from that. It had always been considered the outskirts of town, home to cedar choppers and university professors, the one because that’s where the cedar was, the other because that’s where the college students weren’t. There was one road from town, which wound through the woods and crossed to the river’s west bank, and Austinites who made the drive saw only dope smokers’ shacks tucked in the brush. The area then was probably best known as home to the Soap Creek Saloon, an even earthier contemporary of the Armadillo World Headquarters and a favorite stage for Willie Nelson, Doug Sahm, and the rest of the cosmic cowboy bunch.
The first schoolhouse had been built there in 1874. That original structure, Eanes School, burned down in 1892, but its replacement was built in 1896 and was still in use in the mid-seventies. Well before Westlake High opened, in 1969, the area had grown enough that Eanes served only elementary-school students, and older kids were shipped across the river to Austin High. But with the completion of the high school, and five years later a middle school, Eanes broke off from Austin and formed its own school district. It’s worth noting that when the Westlake High forefathers were choosing an appropriate nickname for the new high school, the close runner-up to Chaparrals was Cedar Choppers.
Inside the schools, out of view of Austin proper, Westlake was well on its way to earning a new reputation when my family got there. I was in the fifth grade, and the school I’d left was the only one I’d ever attended. My friends had been people I’d grown up with, and there had never been any consideration of what or who was cool. Westlake was different. You only needed that first day in the lunchroom to see that there were tables you wanted to sit at and others you didn’t, and you had to be invited to join the right one. That’s probably the kind of revelation any kid has when he starts a new school. But in Westlake, all the kids knew it. My first day there, a sixth-grader asked me if I’d been popular where I’d come from, a question that would have puzzled me if I hadn’t been so undone by his first query: “Are you a guy or a girl?” I was still contemplating a haircut and burning my white Toughskins when he got to the more important point.
Clothes mattered in a way that was altogether new. I’d always known, of course, what an alligator was, and I had a vague idea of what a polo player looked like. But I had no hint of how much it mattered to have one or the other stitched on your shirt or that there was a pecking order to the worth of those labels: Izod alligator, good; Polo pony and mallet swinger, better; JCPenney fox, you can’t sit at our table today.
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