If you were 16 and stupid and didn't think about the consequences.
Which we were, and which we were, and which we didn't.
While you're getting comfortable, let me introduce you to the entourage. David is the tall one with the blonde hair. He had braces until he was 17, but we all thought the slurring of his S's was cool. John was born three days after me, and now that I think about it, seemed like he was bald since we were kids. He wore his hair that short. We'd recently gone to the mall up the street and put some kid who'd been following us headfirst into a trash can. Intellectuals, I know. His kid brother, Rick, is the one bouncing on the bed in yellow shorts and a t-shirt. He had the thickest brown hair you could ever want to meet. He wasn't even a teenager yet. My brother Marc is there, too. He was the youngest of the five of us at only 12.
My cousins and I hardly ever saw each other. All great guys, but they lived a full three-day car ride from me. My dad had been transferred to the right coast when i was only five. Almost all the rest of the family lived a five-hour drive from the left coast. My family made a habit of driving to Utah once a summer for about two weeks to visit, and that's the only time we ever saw them. Wham! Bam! Nice to see you, man.
So, we had to pack in as much adventure as possible.
Obviously.
On this particular evening, and after being banished downstairs for the night by my dad, with a warning to be quiet so parents and grandparents could sleep, we sat up for much of the night just talking about junk semi-close cousins talk about...girls, rock and roll, girls, sports, and girls. In that order.
As I look back, I don't remember who came up with the first bad idea, but it was probably me, being the de facto "adult" in the crowd. I just know the way my pea-brain works. And this is just vacuous enough to have come from that fertile ground.
The room we were banished to for the night was Uncle Lorin's room. He had long since decided to strike out on his own. But despite being one of those north-of-twenty people we weren’t allowed to trust, and only about five years older than any of us, he was still the coolest person any of us had ever met. He liked rock and roll, he talked a little like a hippie, he said "dude" a lot, and he wore his hair longer than any of us were allowed to. I think we all felt honored that we were even allowed to get within 15 feet of his room, much less sleep there. It was sort of a shrine to coolness.
Uncle Lorin's room was a 12x12 foot box with white cinderblock walls and one small transom-like window on the south side. It opened inward and was just big enough for a teenage body to fit through. Bodies that had no business going out this late at night.
Today it makes me wonder how many times Lorin did the same thing to meet up with his buddies. He couldn't have been as stupid as we were that night, but I bet he made choices that weren't exactly exemplary. Maybe that's why we looked up to him. He was a rebel.
After my brother Marc had slithered through the small opening, we were all in the backyard. Ok, now what, coach? None of us had any idea what bad boys did in the middle of the night, so we stood there pretending to each other that we were “bad” for just crawling through the window. I distinctly remember the word "boss" being bantered about, and I'm sure we used the phrase, "we are so cool." Yea, right.
Our grandfather's home was three houses down from the intersection of 7th East and 9th South in Salt Lake City. This is where a 4-lane road (9th South) meets a major artery of the city (7th East). It was a busy intersection even at 2am on a Saturday.
For some reason we all wandered over to the corner, five dopey kids looking for trouble - with a lower-case t - not a capital one. After standing on the corner and watching cars whizz by for a good ten minutes, we all got bored and decided we'd just go back and crawl back into the bedroom. That is, until someone got the second bad idea.
Again, I'm not sure whose idea it was, but it was worse than the first - which probably means it was mine, though, like a good politician, I can neither confirm or deny that fact.
As I remember it, the second bad idea went something like this...we'd all stand there on the corner and wait for the traffic light to turn red. Then, as cars stopped and the drivers patiently waited for the next green, four of us would "beat up" the fifth and then run off, leaving the one badly torn up, lying on the ground. Mugged. Robbed.
You see what I mean? This was a TERRIBLE idea.
Try telling that to a stupid 16-year-old. We wouldn’t have listened anyway.
So, we stood there and waited.
It took quite a while for a car to come down the road and stop at that light. Back then, Salt Lake rolled up the sidewalks at about 10pm. Now, four hours later, traffic was sparse.
We decided that when a car did stop, we'd pretend like we were arguing and pushing each other around. Noiselessly, of course. We didn't want to wake up the neighbors.
Eventually, the light turned red. A neon blue Toyota came to a screeching halt, and we went into action. I'd been elected to play the victim, so the others "punched" me and "kicked" me and knocked me over. Lying on the ground I could feel their shoes tapping me, and then they were gone, running down the sidewalk laughing and jumping like they'd just robbed a Brinks truck. I just laid there, "bleeding" and "writhing" in pretended agony.
That's where this story takes off.
Because so did the Toyota.
After my cousins.
As I sat on the ground watching my worst nightmare come true, that car laid down some smoking rubber, squealing around the corner onto 9th South. The driver took it into my grandfather's driveway, shooting up sparks from all sides as the undercarriage scraped the concrete. Like an exploding clown car at Ringling Brothers, the doors flew open and what seemed like twenty older, much bigger teenagers raced out and chased my cousins and brother down the street. It was really only four, I think, but my brain was so overloaded at this point that you could have told me there were fifty and that one of them was Ronald Reagan himself, and I'd have believed it.
For their part, my accomplices saw the guys coming after them, so they scrambled into side yards, side streets, and alleyways, and took shelter on any front patio they could find, hiding behind lawn furniture and chain link fences and small saplings. I kept walking down the street in a daze, trying to convince those guys that it was all a joke.
To no avail.
They just kept running.
I stopped in the middle of the driveway shaking my head and wondering which jail they'd put us all in. I looked next to me and saw a teenage girl (a girl? Where did she come from?) watching the festivities. I said, "It was all just a joke. Those are my cousins. Nobody really got hurt." She just smiled and patted me on the head. Good puppy.
That's when the trouble with a capital T came storming out of the house.
In his underwear.
And boy, was he mad.
Dad was sleeping on the pullout bed in the front room with mom. They'd heard the car screech into the driveway. Dad had leaped out of bed, looked out the window, and had seen his son, me, trying to explain the real nature of the adventure. He thought someone was trying to abduct me, so he stormed out the door without taking time to cover himself. Afterall, I was more important than modesty.
As he came running down the steps, the four teenagers began returning with my cousins in tow, by their collars. One of them, obviously their leader, said, "I think we got 'em all," with a heavy western accent.
My dad looked at me and said, "Get inside."
One by one we all marched through the front door, through the living room and kitchen, and down the stairs to Lorin's room. When we got there, we saw my brother slipping through the window, breathless, but the only one not caught.
We all shared our perspective of what had happened. David said he'd run down the street, tripped on a curb, and had been apprehended by one of those boys. John and Rick ran together because John didn't want his kid brother to be busted without him. They got caught about a block from grandpa's house while hiding behind a late model Chrysler. Marc, the slipperiest of us all, had run down the next street, hidden in the shadows as one of the kids passed him, then ran down an alleyway before cutting into grandpa's yard and disappearing through the window.
From the basement we eventually heard the car drive out onto the street and speed away. Then we heard dad's footsteps. He made a beeline from the front door to the top of the stairs. "Oh, crap!" we said. "Here he comes!"
But he didn't. He stopped at the top and stood there. Then he turned around and walked back into the living room.
We thought we'd been reprieved for about ten minutes, when we heard his footsteps again walk through the kitchen to the top of the stairs, only to stop again and remain silent. Turning around again, he walked back into the living room and silence reigned anew.
Dad made this short trek ten or eleven more times before the night was through. Each time we'd anticipate complete annihilation. But it never came. Dad never did come down the stairs.
Several times someone would say, "I wish he'd just come down and get it over with!" But he never did. To this day, I'm not quite sure why.
But I can tell you this. We didn't sleep a wink that night. Convicted we were. And dad's footsteps helped us realize just how out of line we'd been.
The next morning David and I walked tentatively up the stairs to breakfast while John and Rick slipped out the backdoor. Dad was already sitting at the table in the dining room eating a bowl of Wheaties. The breakfast of champions. Now with his pajamas on.
"I think you owe me an explanation," he said, not even looking up from the bowl.
I hung my head and told him I was sorry. I told him I knew it was a dumb idea, and explained what happened, David interjecting when I missed a detail he thought was important. The longing for some fun, the two dumb ideas, the mugging, the Toyota, the chase. I explained it all.
Dad just sat there and took it all in. Until we'd finished. He said nary a word.
I think he knew we were just stupid teenage boys, but boys, nonetheless. Of course, one of the first words out of his mouth was "grounded", but he didn't exile any of us to Siberia. He didn't take us to a dungeon somewhere and chain us to a wall. He didn't yell. He didn't scream.
But he did say the word I've hated my whole life and will continue to hate for the rest. “Disappointed.”
There is nothing he could have said or done that would have cut me deeper than to tell me he was disappointed in me. Ground me for three years. Take away my books and my tv. Take away girls and sports. I don't care!! Just don't tell me you're disappointed in me.
Except he did, and he was, and it stung like nothing else ever has.
Before or since.
the end
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