The mean little white boys down the road

Oyster Creek, Texas. No oysters, but plenty of mean little white boys. That’s the Oyster Creek I remember. If it offends some, so be it. Our experiences speak for themselves. Gilbert, me, and John. Louis was too small to remember.

A town of little under a thousand people, Oyster Creek is an hour south of Houston. Someone once called me crazy for saying that this town was an hour south of Houston. “You’re crazy, that can’t be. You’ll be in the ocean.” Well, we were a couple of miles off the coast. The point is, we were near Houston, and we were near the coast. But this town has nothing to do with Oysters. A creek does run through the north part of town, but only a couple of homes overlook the creek. The other creek, which I never knew the name to, splits the town into south and north. The highway, FM 523 splits it east and west.

Oyster Creek is the stepchild of Brazoria county. It’s surrounded by Freeport, Clute, Surfside, and Angleton. We Oyster Creeksters were backwards. I felt this as a child.

El Coyote de Freeport

EL Coyote de Freeport by Daniel Reyes

Part of Part 1

Note: This is a quickly written, unedited, rough draft of the first part of a miniseries of El Coyote de Freeport….more to come later.

Freeport had become what most thought it never would: an authoritarian, stockade-like community where folks as young as 10 were forced to work long days and nights in the surrounding chemical refineries. Like with Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia, people were becoming machines whose sole purpose was to produce labor. Anyone with an agenda other than those who dictated were to be reported immediately. Imprisonment or death was the punishment, depending on the severity of the crime, which was dependent on the mood of the judge at the time.

freeport pre-production

we’re about to start pre-production on freeport. it’s a story that explores the lives of a group of friends working in a chemical refinery. i chose to make freeport my debut feature film because it takes place in my hometown. i’m really itching to do a horror film, though. perhaps that could be the sequel: freeport zombies!

freeport NOT shreveport

i’m from freeport, not shreveport. i’ve repeated this too many times to people who ask where i’m from, and when i tell them freeport, they say, “oh, shreveport?”. do my f’s sound like shr’s and ee’s sound like eve’s?

this reminds me. 3rd grade. young daniel had to meet with a speech pathologist weekly to work on ch/sh and j/z sounds. i had certain fricative and affricate deficiencies, and she was there to help. i was a bit embarrassed because this meant i had a problem; i felt different than other students and more conscious in how i spoke. i sure as hell wasn’t being rewarded for some gift or talent i possessed. i did not meet certain requirements or expectations in the general english spoken language, so i needed rehabilitation. my first rehab.