Stand By Me

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Weekends in a small town. My place was big enough for adventure but small enough to keep your secrets. A place with character filled with characters. A place that took its Friday/Saturday nights as serious as its Sunday mornings.

Times were simpler back then. I'm talking the 80s now.....classic teen years for dudes now approaching the double-nickel. Friday night lights and Saturday night bon-fires and pooling your money for the weekend holy-grail……beer. You had to have a connection back then......a 21 year old who trusted you not to rat him out if the cops grabbed your stash. We had one....but his reliability was akin to a coin-flip. Many a night we stood on the corner waiting for his pick-up truck to arrive, huddled around the pay-phone, bouncing up and down trying to keep feet warm as it grew later and later...and then it was past 9pm and the distributor was closed. The agony of defeat.

Lesson learned. You can’t always get what you want. Even if you’ve got the money to pay for it.

***

But the next week he'd just as likely be there, and we'd each chip in $2, and maybe that was enough for 2 cases of Busch or Genessee or some other cheap ghastly swill that would take paint off the hood of your car. We'd meet the guy for the drop-off at a local park.....and in the summer and fall it was ideal.....the park's trees providing cover and even nearby garbage cans for the more guilt-ridden Irish Catholics like me. In the winter snow, however, there was no camouflage from the nightly police patrols. We'd be lit up against the backdrop of snow like somebody was shining a light on us.....so you either had to dress like a Cossack or place yourself in an area with multiple escape routes. Nobody found it odd that we'd all be standing there in sub-freezing temps, scratching out places to stand to keep feet dry, drinking beer as fast as possible so it wouldn't freeze....and always only wearing a single glove. On the drinking hand. (Michael Jackson stole our shtick,. bro.)

Boys and girls in America. The beer hit some like a cattle prod and others like a summer rain, and couples would pair off to and fro, clutching and grabbing at each other for dear life.....searching for hearts to hang onto. At least for that night. Those of us not notorious enough for female companionship would hang back and share dreams. Friendships were cemented on nights like this....secrets shared and bonds formed that time and distance couldn't break. Things are never as intense as they feel when you are on the edge of seventeen, which was just another way of saying “hold onto 16 as long as you can”, but Stevie was better looking than Mellencamp, and got to us a few years earlier.

At that age you’ll never feel better, or worse. The dopamine is heroic. It's an intensity that you tend to forget when you're old enough to pass judgement on your own brood.

It's wise to remember it. It will save you mixed-up confusion later. And possibly therapy bills for junior.

***

As we got older we sought out the sound of the water. Kegs replaced cases, as we all started chipping in a little more. Inflation and all. Maybe $3 each now. A neckless football player would hoist the thing on his back and carry it the 500 yards it needed to go, impressing all the girls in the process. We found an isolated spot at the top of town, walking distance from the neighborhood but just barely, down a long dirt road, leading to a meandering creek that still soothes the soul all these years later. Down there we could gather some tree branches and lay them down on the rocks and build a fire. No houses around. No worry about noise. For a time the cops let it all play out (until the older kids found out about it). No harm, no foul. Somebody would bring a boom box. Some cassette tapes. The music had to compete with the moving water, so the volume was always healthy. I can still smell the fire.....and how it gelled perfectly with the crisp autumn air, creating something like a safety net that made us all feel impervious. Nobody wanted nights like this to end. Hope would co-exist with regret, but at that age it actually seemed like a fair fight.

***

I was reminded of all this by watching "Stand By Me" on Netflix the other night.....to me the greatest of all the Stephen King movie adaptations.

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"

I've seen the movie at least a dozen times over the years, and that last line....typed in that glorious green-text computer by the Richard Dreyfuss character, always gives me the feels. Because it's so simple and true.

Times were simpler. There was less evil in the world. Less boogeymen. We were scared less. You could lie to your parents about sleeping over a friend's and end up camping out 20 miles from home, searching for a dead body...wandering back home at 5am on the last day of summer, and bullshit your way out of it.

We were allowed to disappear. To be untracked. Unreachable.

But even then, we knew it was temporary. Being “grown-up” beckoned. What we were doing we would not be allowed to do soon. We didn’t know where the rule came from, but knew it was there.

Another lesson.

In a bit...

--tf