High School

High school began. It was bigger and older and had a tradition. Otherwise, it was just the same. We met new kids and melded into the social structure. Like went with like, kind with kind. One difference was the student parking lot. That seemed to promise everything. At lunch, kids would go to their cars to smoke. You weren't supposed to, but enforcement was pretty lax. I couldn't wait to get a car.

But I was still hanging around with high school drop outs, too. I didn't want to play drums any more, and I was teaching myself the guitar. Tommy's father was playing steel guitar and Tommy and I sometimes played with him and his band when they practiced. His father got Tommy a bass guitar because his band needed one. Country music was funny, and it seemed easy, too. It was fun, but it was not like playing in a rock and roll band. I felt, though, I was learning something from those songs though I wouldn't have wanted anyone to know.

On weekends, my parents started going to the local race track. A friend of theirs, a man my mother had worked with until he quit and bought his own full-service gas station, had built a race car, so we would go and watch him race. I liked it. It was a small track with a bleachers full of people. They played music over the loud speakers between races, and I liked to listen. In memory, Terry Stafford's "Suspicion" was always playing, though I think I remember "Abilene," by George Hamilton IV, too.

Our friend did not do very well, often finishing last or near the back of the pack, but I didn't mind. I didn't like the fellow much, anyway. There were several car classes, and my favorite was the Funny Cars. There was an old hot rod with an extended front chassis and a square, boxy cab that was painted blue and yellow that I cheered for. The nights he won were the best.

My parents would let me go get the carnival food after the third race--popcorn, hot dogs, cotton candy, soda pop--and I always enjoyed mingling with the crowd then walking under the bleachers and looking up to see the underside of life.

And if we were lucky, there would be a Demolition Derby at the end with all the cars driving around the infield backwards trying to crash into the radiator of some other car. One by one, the cars would steam, then stall until only two were left chasing each other around the bone yard of dead metal, everybody laughing and cheering. And then everyone would join the procession back to our own cars and the end of Saturday night.

And we would go to see my aunt and uncle who had moved to the coast. And we would fish. During the day, my mother and her sister would walk the beaches collecting shells and pails full of shark's teeth. At dusk, we would wade in the shallow brackish waters and seine for shrimp with which to fish. Sometimes, we would wade the shallow waters at night trying to avoid stepping on sting rays. But mostly, we stood on jetties and bridges and threw our lines into the water looking for snook but usually coming up only with lady fish and sheepshead and sail catfish with their dangerous barbs.

I would stand there in the darkness listening to the water and dream of something that I wasn't sure of. Perhaps it was another shore somewhere in all this water. I didn't know enough yet, though, to dream in detail. I was simply awash in emotion, longing, longing.