The End of Summer

My second fall term would begin soon, and it would be my last at the junior college. Under the influence of Vladi, I had taken big loads and gone through the summer and was going to graduate in December. Most of the people I knew had not bee as diligent and would take a lot longer. Graduating from high school a year early had driven Vladi. He was in a hurry now. He wanted to be a doctor like his father, but he didn't seem to want to wait. He wanted to be a doctor now. And since I was fortunate enough not to have to work, I took an extra class or two each semester.

My buddies had returned from backpacking around Europe. It did not seem that they had been gone so long, but they were there a month. When I saw them, I was surprised by how thin they had become. They told tales of meeting girls and staying in hostels, of eating leftover food off plates in restaurants, of staying up and smoking dope. There had been rifts on the trip and they had paired off and gone their separate ways at times. In truth, none of it inspired me to envy. But they were back and I was glad about that. They were my friends. We were the Blue Devils for god's sake.

But as it goes, things never got back to "normal." Chuck, who hadn't really taken school seriously and whose biggest influence seemed to have become drugs, suddenly, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere, decided to join the Navy. It didn't take long. He was there, and then he was gone. What had happened, I wondered? What in the world would inspire such a change? Nobody I talked to had a clue. Not even his closest friend, Leonard.

It was with Leonard and Chuck that I started running that first semester of college. Leonard's parents had recently gotten divorced and so he was the man of the family which consisted of his mother, who was an elementary school teacher, and three younger sisters, the oldest of which I was completely in heat over. I hung out at his house just to see her much of the time. Leonard, it seemed to me, had it made.

And that was why I was so surprised when he moved out of the house. But he had met a girl. She was a bit older than he and from a big city farther south, and her ideas about life were much more cosmopolitan than ours. To us who grew up in this sleepy southern hamlet, she seemed close to being a movie star. Her hair was naturally platinum and her eyes never seemed to focus anywhere but moved about the world as she looked inward to her own thoughts and feelings. She had a high, aristocratic voice that spoke to us of money, but she lived a hippie lifestyle, though of a richer order than the rest of us. The richness came not so much from money but from taste. While we just looked like poor street kids wearing flip-flops and jeans, she looked like she had shopped in the flea markets of London and Paris with great flowing skirts and ancient bangles. We all envied Leonard, though we thought it would end badly. He just seemed out of his league. Our league, perhaps.

He was the first fellow I knew to move in with a girl. It was still uncommon for us who had grown up with 1950s moral values. Our parents would never have had an unmarried couple to the house, though they may have known such people. Divorces were unsightly enough. So I was appropriately impressed when Leonard made his move out of the house where, as I said, I thought he had it made. More than anything, though, I would miss looking at his sister.

They got an apartment close to downtown, part of a big old wooden house built in the nineteen-twenties. They were living with his girl's younger brother who had recently come to town. The apartment was covered with parachute material and had low couches and cushions and pillows on the floor like some of the apartments I'd seen in movies. It always smelled of incense. I liked going over there, but I was never entirely comfortable with his girlfriend and not at all with her brother. Though they didn't try, they made me feel provincial. They'd had experiences that I hadn't yet imagined. I'd never thought of myself as conventional in any way, but they made me seem to myself a boy unwilling to leave tradition behind. And in truth, that may have been true to a degree I was not aware of yet.

In the last days of summer just before the fall term began, we had some jolting news. A fellow we all knew and liked, one we had gone to high school with, had bought a Harley Sportster and had chopped it up to look like the one in "Easy Rider." He was a big guy, fat really, but he looked good on that bike. And like a lot of kids we had gone to high school with, he had taken to the drugs and rock and roll life. He was on his way to a city on the coast some sixty miles away one night to go to a concert. The details were unclear, but it seems a semi-truck had run him over from behind. He was killed instantly. How in the hell could that happen, we all wondered? But it had and he was gone.

We were a year out of high school. My second year of college was beginning. Things had certainly changed.