Election Headquarters

 

 

“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.

 

Noah F.