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The way we were
2005-01-10 - 11:06 p.m. When I was a teenager back where I grew up in the 0hi0 V@lley, during the winter there wasn't a whole hell of a lot to do. There wasn't a whole lot to do, ever, but we didn't know that at the time and managed to have a helluva lot of fun doing little or nothing. The problem was that usually the little or nothing with which we amused ourselves was verging on illegal or had already crossed the damn line. Much of what we did involved buying quantities of beer and "riding around." There were two versions of "riding around." The first had to do with cruising the main drag of the town, basically from one pizza place to another, on a winding highway, passing an elementary school with a retaining wall at the bottom of a gently sloping hill. This was the prime midway point. People congregated there to see and be seen, to catch rides with friends "uptown" to the other pizza place or points north / west, just to hang out and chill. Once headed uptown, it was de rigeur to make the circuit past the pizza joint, turn by the cop shop and go up the alley by the bar where all the over-21 crowd hung out, then up by the only remaining pizza shop in town. Usually we rounded it out by passing the Polish and Italian clubs before heading out of town, because surely somebody would be teetering out the door and more than happy to wobble back in and buy us another six-pack or three and save us the ride back to WV to buy 3.2 beer. What an anomaly - 3.2 beer. But anyway, that was the route for when you were On the Hunt. Looking for a wayward man/boy/wannabehookup. You were working an Agenda, and the beer (3.2 or 7.0 notwithstanding) was merely the social lubricant. When you were serious about Getting Fucked Up, you took 250. You headed for the hills, literally. Passed bars by the name of "Dreamland." Pissed in their parking lot if necessary, or their bathroom if you could stagger in with some aplomb, being that you were probably 6 or 7 years too young to even crack open the door. But it was a great spot to break the seal, so to speak. While driving / riding on these twisting, turning roads, you smoked a buttload of pot. Pot was cheap then. Imagine that. Everybody rolled and smoked spliffs. And used the huge paper from Cheech & Ch0ng's "Big B@mb00." You'd have 6 people in a Bobcat, and six j's fired up. It was reefer m@dness. All of a sudden, the dashboard of the bobcat or mustang looked like the cockpit of a plane, and 250 was the runway. You'd hit this straightaway about 10 miles out, and it was like you were flying. Your boyfriend would grab you and pull you close in the backseat, kiss you deep and hard, making you giddy with the intensity of first love. Both of you would smell like musk: Coty Wild Musk for you and Jovan Musk for Men for him. You couldn't sit close enough, and this was the only place you ever wanted to be: right here with him, in the back of his sister's best friend's Mustang, listening to Elton John and Lynyrd Skynyrd cranked up high enough to blow a speaker wire, which was ok because you weren't talking anyway. That was pretty much how my teenage years from 14-15 went. At 16, I got a fake id and started going out to the bars in WV. The first love had broken my heart by then. It was a loss of innocence. I didn't believe in "right now" anymore when I felt I'd been cheated out of "forever." I guess it was then that I started seeking things I've yet to find. It was still fun, in that m@yberry smalltown kind of way, but it was different. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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