“Ten o’
clock. By the bank…” Autumn, 1980.
That was our
common meeting spot on weekends. Me and
my friend Dave.
I had just
turned thirteen. He was there a few months already. We’d known each other for about a year. We met up just shortly after starting at the
same Junior High school together.
Neither one of us blended easily in a crowd, and each of us needed a
friend in our own right. For that
reason, we’d been good for one another. But boys don’t bond quite the same way
that girls do, and even girls can have their share of problems in
friendships. Dave and I, despite plenty
of appreciation for each other had ours, and after months of relying on each
other’s daily company had a rather inexplicable split for a while. It was he who instigated it at one point, not
really myself. And it came simply by way
of a confrontation we had one day with some menacing classmates. While I was just as resigned as always about
it, he was fed up once and for all about being victimized, and blamed me and my
attitude about the whole thing. The
result was an unavoidable split that lasted a good few months. I doubted we’d return to one another, until
fall and eighth grade arrived, when he simply grabbed me in the hallway and
said, “listen, you’re coming with us next Tuesday, over to Carl’s place…” Wow….Who was “us”, anyway…? Who was Carl, and where was his place…?
Next Tuesday
was Election Day. There’d be no school,
and nothing for us kids to do. But this
Tuesday, we’d have something to do. I
was certainly up for it.
A day or two
later, Dave phoned me. He said we’d meet on Tuesday at ten, on the corner where
the bank was. It would soon become our
weekend meet-up site. He was not
necessarily the old, one-liner dependable comic creature I remembered. He was now a little taller, a little more
athletic, in better physical shape and just a little more aggressive.
Everything I wasn’t and everything he was now trying to inspire me to be. It wasn’t going to work. But the important thing was, he was still
funny. He never dropped the Don Rickles
thing, and clearly, despite all his pubescent revisions, he knew better than to
lose his best style. He obviously didn’t
want to lose his most patient friend either.
I was just as glad to be reuniting with mine. I needed a laugh, regularly.
But now,
Dave had more of an agenda. On the day
he summoned me, we’d be spending time with some kids we knew. One was a former
classmate, the other was some kid from the neighborhood, Carl, whose folks were
live-in custodians at an old luxury apartment building in town, one of those
sixty-year-old Tudor places that old money lived in. The front lobby looked like somewhere that
Hurstwood would have romanced Sister Carrie.
We weren’t
allowed in the lobby. Just as well. We’d meet up around the side, behind the
service entrance, in a little storage room that had just one little window up
top. Big empty room, nice for the four
of us.
Zak was this
tall, lanky kid we’d known from school.
I didn’t see Zak around much at school these days, and Carl attended a
different school entirely. Neither one of these guys were the laugh riot Dave
was, and neither one of them laughed at his one-liners as much as I did. All these thirteen-year-olds wanted to do was
get stoned. And that they did.
For many
kids, especially boys, reaching pre-adolescence means reaching for something
out of bounds, something long restricted to them, something dangerous, branding
them beyond the gates of innocence. I
never really had that calling, but others did. Like Dave. Even if he knew better than to part with his
humorous side in return for exemplary danger, he still needed to break those
boundaries. My desire not to didn’t turn
me against him or these friends of his.
But it didn’t bore me any less.
When we
entered our “club house”, first order of business was Carl whipping out his
little Sucrets box, packed with rolled joints.
He and Zak would light up. The
stench and the whole hashish den thing was not something I really
appreciated. The all-new Dave of course
thought it was cool, and partook, but I just kind of sat back from it all. I had no taste for any of it. I was really aboard for the laughs. I could still depend on Dave to be killer
hilarious, which he was. Though for a
room of stoners, I seemed to be the only one steeped in hysterics.
On the way
over, we got ourselves a pizza. Each one
of us grabbed a slice or two. I of
course wanted to know if there was a plate, or at least a napkin I could lay my
slice on. There was none. Dave said, “I’ve got no problem with that…”,
and laid his slice atop his mullet head.
He did this obviously for comic effect. I was dead with laughter. No one else was. Were these guys that humorless..??
Humor
actually did nothing to keep Zak and Carl from getting into some kind of a dispute
all of a sudden. Something about money
owed for joints provided. Dave couldn’t
really keep the two at peace and before long, things got physical. That’s when I ducked out of the room and into
the alley. From the window above I heard
the shouts and the shoving, bodies slamming against walls like a staged
Hollywood fight scene. I had every
intention of remaining outside ‘til this died down. It was a nice day. Before long, through the window above I heard
the click of beer bottles opening. Peace
prevailed. It was safe to enter.
Later,
Dave’s mom showed up. She’d meet up with
him after school nearby and whenever he ventured out of their
neighborhood. Then they’d return home
together, a couple towns away on the bus.
No one seemed to have a problem with her prancing on in, and she had
uniquely no problem with her boy and his friends drinking and stoning. She
ascribed to the school of “as long as I know where he is…”. Vera was a fairly young woman, younger than
my mom. But somehow, she seemed a good
deal older. She wore some very outdated
polyester outfitting from a time years prior, and it appeared not to have been
laundered since. Her complexion looked
extremely haggard, and she bore a personality very semi-comic, to match her
teen son’s. She was a genuine, very
grumpy Sandra Bernhard. The boys seemed
to accept her just fine, and when she pulled herself out a cigarette, Zak lit
hers along with his own, for which she politely thanked him. It was all very, very strange to me. And yet, for the portrait at hand, it all
kind of worked.
Around four
p.m, we all dispersed. I went back home
to my mom. She’d already been out and
voted. I sprawled out on my bed and went
out like a light for an hour or two.
Later that night was the election.
My mom wasn’t much for any of it.
Everyone knew it would be Reagan Country, and either you were rich and
thrilled, or poor and fearsome, my mom among the latter. She and her long-time friend Mildred, from
the neighborhood, groused together about the loom of a Republican America. Mildred was married and she and her husband
were fairly well-off, despite their politics. Liberal Wealth. My long-single mom was more on the
one-percent end of liberal struggle.
That was the dividing line that balanced their friendship. Playing Scrabble and talking books kept them
together.
But no one I
knew seemed interested in election returns that night. As a kid in school, teachers always try to
encourage watching the election with your folks and educating yourself about
the Electoral Process. The way I
learned it at home, it was much more simple:
The rich win, the poor lose.
That’s why the election returns didn’t play in our living room. My mom was watching the Channel 9 Special Presentation
of The Deer Hunter instead, dejected about our economic fate.
The next
day, my mom said to me, “Mildred called me……she’s in mourning about the
election. She’s in mourning….Can
you believe that…?!?”
I didn’t
know about her, but I certainly could.
