We all have probably known that kid. You know the one I’m talking about, that strange kid that didn’t quite fit in anywhere. He wasn’t an outsider, really, he got along with the jocks but he wasn’t very good at sports. He got along with the brainiacs, but his grades didn’t stand out. He hung out with the band kids, but didn’t play an instrument. He even got along with the difficult kids, the trouble makers, but again he was not considered one of them either. That drifter who didn’t fit in a clique, yep, that was me.
I always prided myself on the fact that I could connect with people who were so different from each other. We didn’t have to be carbon copies of each other to be friends, we just had to find common ground. This usually manifested itself in hobbies, music interests, parents worked in the same place, or family situations. Such was the case with my friendship with Tommy.
Tommy was one of those
difficult kids. He’d get into fights, he’d draw penises on his notebooks, and
his grades were slowly rolling into the gutter to keep his mind company. So you
may wonder what common ground we had, and no I was not a talented artist who
could depict the human anatomy so prominently on the covers of my text books.
No, our common ground was that we were children of divorced parents. Now this didn’t mean
that kids of divorced parents are all bad, it’s really the question of how they
deal with the situation. Tommy’s method
for dealing with it was to rebel.
It was a Friday afternoon, school was out and I was waiting for the bus to go home. Suddenly Tommy pulled up in his dad’s old Buick. My classmate, Sean was in the back seat already. No big deal, right? Except we were 15 and none of us had a driver’s license yet, not even a learner’s permit. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but after a couple minutes of being heckled by those two, I finally gave up and got in the car. Like my father, Tommy’s father worked late shift that day, so nobody was really expecting us at home. We decided that we’d go to Mickey D’s in the neighboring city and afterwards cruise the diamond.
We decided to take the
back roads to avoid being notice by someone who might recognize us, or even
worse, the town cops. The roads were pretty empty, flat, and straight. So it
wasn’t much of a challenge to keep the car on the road. Sean found a bottle of
vodka hidden in the back seat, so we broke that open too. Tommy enjoyed hitting
the breaks every time I had the bottle to my mouth, needless to say I ended up
with more than my share of that bottle.
Everything was going as planned. We hung out at Mickey D’s, did a couple
of rounds at the diamond without issue. But it was getting late and Tommy’s dad
was going to be home in about 2 hours, so we decided to get some gas and head
back.
We had to take a
shorter route as time was running out, so we were speeding along pretty good
too. I was pretty familiar with the road, and I warned Tommy that we were
coming up on a sharp curve and that we were going too fast. But Tommy,
over-confident as ever, said “Bet I can take this curve doing 80!” I braced
myself in the seat with my hands stiffly on the dashboard. As I’m sure you can
imagine, he didn’t make that turn. No,
the car flew out of the curve landing sideways at a 45 degree angle in the
ditch.
I thought my thumbs were
broken but other than that, I was okay. Sean also seemed okay, he was looking
for the vodka bottle. Tommy’s head was resting on the steering wheel and I ask
if he was okay. “No, I’m dead, I’m so dead.” At that moment the radiator popped
and steam was rolling out from under the hood. As drunk as I was, I saw the
“smoke” and the orange light from the turn signal which was bent inward. “Fire!
The car is on fire!” Sean climbed out of the cars and took off down the road,
Tommy just sat there waiting for the end, and I had to climb out over the
backseat to get out of the door Sean had just exited. It was already dusk, so
it was a little hard to see. But I saw Sean fly backwards all of the sudden. It
looked so comical, but a second later I hit the electric fence too and flew
backwards.
After we got our
bearings, I walked to the next house down the road and called a tow truck. The
driver was surprised to see 3 drunken teenagers without licenses, but he didn’t
give us a hard time. I guess he was just happy that we were calling him and not
an ambulance. He towed the car back to Tommy’s house, and Sean and I went home.
The rest of the weekend, I waited for that call. The one which would change my
life forever, the one that would say we stole a car and totaled it. But it
never came.
On Monday, I met up
with Tommy and asked him what happened. He told me that he told his dad that he
took the car and crashed it. He never told him that he wasn’t alone. His dad
was pissed, of course, and Tommy spend the next few years working off the
damage. But I never forgot how he took responsibility for it and kept me and
Sean out of the picture.
Years had passed and we went our separate ways. I joined the Army, Tommy joined the Air Force, and Sean stayed and got a job at the local factory. I was on leave and went back to visit my family. I ran into Sean down at the tavern and we started talking about the old days. I asked him if he’d seen Tommy lately. The color ran from his face as he realized that I didn’t know. Tommy never made it back from Iraq. I never found out what had happened, and I could never face his family to talk about it. Every time I’m home and I drive that old road, I can still see Tommy grinning at me. I miss you, brother.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of "Tales from the
Dorkside".
Be sure to recommend,
if you did.
Thank you
