Clueless

Steve had decided to get married, and he was going to join the Marines.  It was a shock to my system, really.  He was seventeen, but his parents had agreed to sign for him.  He would be a certified, day-to-day adult.  I hadn't seen him much for a good while.  He had changed or been changed in the last months.  It seemed a premature end to the party though.  The gang was breaking up.  

Wayne had been gone for awhile, mostly, playing on the road and in the studio.  He had just played guitar on a song recorded by Dione Warwick, and he said she agreed to record a song he had written.  Meanwhile, his own band had recorded an album with a major label, but he wasn't sure when it would be released.  

So I spent most of my time with Tommy.  Although he was working, he still lived at home, and the two of us were fanciful, filled with romantic ideas and dreams.  We had been playing guitars, using capos and learning how to play so that we complimented rather than competed with one another, and working on our harmonies.  We learned some new chords on our own just fooling around on the fret board, most of them jazz chords that allowed us to play in a Brazilian style.  We were beginning to write our first songs.  

We heard of a coffee house where every Saturday night musicians got together and played, and so we decided to go.  It was in a Church, which scared us more than a little, but it was really funky and dark with low tables and pillows and a stage where musicians performed.  

The thing was, everybody seemed to know one another.  They all chatted among themselves easily while Tommy and I watched on.  And they were really good.  Most of them, it seemed, had studied music and could play a variety of instruments.  They'd put down a guitar and wring a beautiful song out of the piano.  People had clarinets and flutes and when they sat down to jam, everything was instant.  

Even more than that, though, is that they had a social grace that we could not emulate.  It became evident to us that these kids were much better off than we were.  Their hair was cutin salons, their clothes were hip but expensive.  They played Martin and Gibson guitars and drove foreign cars, convertibles even.  And the girls. . . I couldn't even hope.  

Tommy and I tried to join in, playing some songs for them and singing backup harmonies on others.  We weren't shunned, exactly, but we weren't invited to do more, either.  And so we sat in the shadows, growing silent, watching, my feet feeling too large, my clothes too oafish, my voice too hillbilly.  Polish.  That is what we lacked.  Neither of us said anything like that, but we felt it.  There was a party and we hadn't been invited.  We could, as they say, smell the sweet scent of possibility, but the real event was elsewhere, somewhere we couldn't go.  

A month later, Tommy bought an expensive Martin guitar.  

At school, I was on the constant dodge.  My hair was too long.  It broke the rules.  None of my teachers were turning me in, but I had to watch out for administrators, one in particular, a Vice Principal who had been a coach and a Driver's Ed. teacher.  He thought he was slick and it was well known that when he taught he flirted with the girls.  It was reported that he had a few affairs, but that was before I went to school there, so I had no confirmation.  What I did know was that he didn't like my type, and so I kept my distance as best I could.  He was a malicious and horrible man.  

I was still hiding, too, from Dwayne and his crowd.  I heard that my heel had left a good bruise above and between his eyes.  I had to watch out wherever I went.  After school, I'd either run to my car and leave as quickly as I could, or I'd wait somewhere until almost everyone had gone.  Sometimes, I rode with other people.  

One day, I got a ride with the fellow who used to take our band pictures in junior high school, the nerdy Louis Nye-looking fellow.  I was riding with him and several of the old band members and with Jimmy who who had taken the beating from Eddie a while back.  Louis had a van, and we all packed in and lit up cigarettes ready to be free of the social claustrophobia of the campus.  But just as we were pulling out of the parking lot, a car full of older guys, guys who didn't go to high school, pulled up beside the van and said, "Hey shithead, were you throwing eggs the other night?"  Now I didn't hang out with these guys anymore, so I hadn't a clue what was being talked about, but I could hear from the tension in Louis' voice that there was truth in the question.  

"No," he said.  He was lying.  There was more banter about an ass kicking before Louis pulled the plug on it by driving his van out into the road and speeding away.  The guys in the other car were facing the opposite direction and would have to drive through the parking lot and come around.  So Louis made a couple of turns winding his way through a neighborhood until he felt that he could not be followed.  Everyone was laughing now, and Louis confessed that it had been him, that he was driving around with some guys who thought throwing the eggs would be funny.  And it was for a moment.  

Louis stopped and let the first guy out at his house when  suddenly the car full of guys drove up.  The driver made a slick move and nosed his car in so that Louis could not pull ahead, and then all the fellows jumped out and surrounded the van.  The guys I was riding with would not even pretend to be tough, and so with simultaneous clicks, all the doors were locked.  We looked out through the vans big picture windows with wide eyes and weak smiles at the angry, dangerous, unknown characters.  

The driver was at Louis' window, screaming, spit flying with every word.  Louis was trying to make his weak excuses when the fellow punched him through the half opened window.  Louis was no fighter, and the glancing blow really undid him, and for some reason, his foot went off the brake and onto the accelerator.  He had never put the van in park, so with a lurch, it crashed into the other car's open door bending it back the wrong way against the front bumper.  You could hear the metallic bending of the hinges.  Everybody's eyes, including the dangerous characters', popped open in disbelief.  Louis, however, not losing a moment, shifted into reverse and began backing up to the cross street.  The dangerous characters made for the other car.  As Louis drove looking out over his shoulder, Jimmy was shouting out directions about what to do.  I watched as everyone jumped into the automobile to give chase, but the driver's door would not budge.  The last I saw as we made the U-turn was every one of them heaving their weight against the door trying to pop it on its hinges.  Suddenly, everything turned funny.  It was like something I'd seen in the Keystone Kops.  

Louis wasn't dropping anyone off at their homes now.  His mind was twirling with what had just happened.  He was wanted, a criminal, guilty of aggravated mischievousness and hit and run.  Surely they had not gotten his tag number.  They must not find out where he lived.  

Louis grudgingly stopped long enough to drop me off on his way home, never bringing the van to a complete halt.  Hoping that I could make my way home without running into that car full of juiced up maniacs, I ran down side streets always planning which fences I could hop and which yards I could run through if  their car came into view.  

Locked into one thing, locked out of another.   My parents were fighting and my friends going elsewhere.  What was I supposed to do?  I felt trapped in a maze of trailer parks and neighborhoods full of cracker box houses, caught between criminals and the terminally dull, those who aspired to the lives of their parents.  

"I will break free," I thought, "I will," though for the moment, I hadn't a clue how.