“How rich and rewarding our friendship might have been all these years if we hadn’t disconnected when we were younger.”
Well, here it is, another May 4th… another year after the year I was a junior in high school, finding myself another year further down the road, now 31 years on.
I pause each year at this time, to remember a particular evening in 1979, for what I consider to be a watershed moment in my life, the critical point in my life when I started along the path to become the person I am today. To that point, my existence had been sufficient to simply float along, still tied to the apron strings of my childhood. To be certain, I had started to explore beyond the familiar surroundings of my life sometime in the middle of the prior year, but to that date I had never dared myself to peck at the shell and crack open the egg, until that night.
So, what exactly happened? Interestingly enough, I’m not sure I remember; not necessarily because of the amount of time and brain cells lost between then and now, but rather because I was flat out drunk on the night in question and I can only remember bits and pieces. I do remember receiving my parents’ permission to go out on that Friday night, and Roxy driving her big ass car up to my house, with Joe and Susan along for the ride. We picked up Kenny, and then I rode shotgun as we headed over to Trenton. I recall the purple flowers of rhododendrons in bloom somewhere along Pennsylvania Avenue in Morrisville (or was that the following week, when we saw Dawn of The Dead at the Morrisville Drive-In?) It started to rain. We picked up some beer, somewhere; I sat in the car while side one of Born To Run played on the radio – it was all cool, we were in New Jersey. Susan told me she was from New Jersey… after a while we stopped for a bathroom break, Joe, Kenny and I pissing near the front of the car, and in my naiveté I wandered to the back of the car to ask the two squatting women if they had dropped something.
From there, things get murky. I recall kissing Roxy; I vaguely remember something about scraping a guardrail; eventually I exchanged places with Kenny and ended up in the back seat, drinking Tuborg Gold with Susan and Joe. I moved in and out of consciousness, and heard in the distance Joe repeatedly telling me to stop grabbing his crotch. We made it to somewhere, maybe Burlington, where we stopped in the parking lot while Roxy helped Susan deal with some bad medicine; the Rolling Stones You Can’t Always Get What You Want played on the radio; the most memorable part of the evening was when we ended up in Lahaska at Peddler’s Village, to use the facilities. I found Roxy in the men’s room, just as she had proceeded to leave lipstick covered lip prints all over the mirror. We walked back to her car, and I pulled up a clump of yellow flowers, roots and all, from one of the beds and presented them to her.
Somewhere between Lahaska and Levittown, I went down for the count. We arrived back at my parents’ house after what seemed like an eternity, but I believe it was only c. 11:30 PM. Joe walked me to the door and practically poured me across the threshold. I went to my room and passed out, only to be awakened by my concerned parents minutes later, worried that I was permanently brain damaged from the alcohol and whatever other chemicals were coursing through my bloodstream (maybe I was.)
So, what’s the big deal? I went out with some friends and got a bit plastered – maybe it was the first time, but it was certainly not the last. No, the big deal was that somehow, during the course of the night’s events, I came to identify something that sparked inside me to question the status quo, to embrace the new, to explore, to examine, to feel, to care, to love, and find out once and for all exactly who I am, what do I believe, and what is important to me.
Maybe it was all just coincidence, but I don’t think that it was; the friends I was with that evening were friends who encouraged me, who saw in me the potential, and believed in me. Out of the energy we shared, on that night and others, came the writer, artist, designer, reader, gardener, hiker, lover, husband and father that I am today.
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