All of us
have had experiences like this. The ones
that aren’t funny at the time, but many years later you can look back on and
laugh. This happened when I was a junior
in high school and my three best friends and I were—for lack of a better term,
an entourage of sorts. Believe me, if
HBO didn’t make a ton of money on a show using the word as a title the thought
would have never crossed my mind. But since it was a comedy and since I’m looking back on it now and
laughing: Yes, we were indeed an entourage.
Except none of us were rich and famous.
Or particularly easy on the eyes.
But we did make it through high school and lived to tell about it…in
spite of that one night in the winter of 1972.
Before I
take you with me to Neptune Beach, Florida in a time when Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together was pretty much all
you could hear on your car’s AM radio, I’d like you to meet my entourage.
Rodney was
the only child of our high school’s algebra teacher. Lucky for me I always did well in her class,
at least up until the semester she tried to teach us how to use a slide rule
(that I believe became extinct around the time MTV debuted). Rodney was a bright guy whose feet pointed
outward at 60-degree angles when he walked (think extremely pigeon-toed, except
with feet pointing in the opposite direction). Having Rodney as a friend in no
way, shape or form offered me any concessions with his mother who insisted I
graduate high school knowing how to use a slide rule to navigate my way around
any logarithms I might encounter in the future.
(Fact: Neither happened, as I never learned to master the slide rule and
I have yet to encounter a logarithm.
That is, unless a logarithm is that odd growth on the side of my left
foot in which case I regret not being a little more diligent in my high school
academic curriculum and will think about that very fact every time my left foot
feels like it’s way too big for its shoe.)
If our small
circle of friends were based on the television show Friends, Tim would have
been our ‘Joey.’ How best to describe
him? I’ll use another television show
for reference: The Addams Family. Imagine Cousin Itt with 18 inches less
hair and 18 inches more height. And a
bad case of acne. Tim was the one most likely to end up in the Dean of Boy’s
office after school. Or sleeping through
the black-and-white films in civics class.
Or eating nine ice cream sandwiches at lunch so he would get a bellyache
and get to go home from school early. I
knew Tim all three years of high and never—NEVER met his parents. I was in his house one time and heard his mom
and dad talking in the other room. It
was like listening to the parents talking in a Charlie Brown holiday special;
you know, with the ‘wah-wah-wah’ sound of a muffled trumpet in place of actual
human voices. To be honest if I had a
son like Tim I might have wanted to keep a pretty low profile myself, which now
that I think about it is probably the reason I never met his parents.
Jeff was my best
friend. Jeff had three sisters, a pretty
cool mom and a dad who was a professor at Jacksonville University when the
basketball team made it to the final game of March Madness only to suffer a
heartbreaking defeat at the hands of the great coach John Wooden’s mighty UCLA
Bruins. The Dolphins of JU were the
first college basketball team to feature two seven-footers on their roster: One
went on to play professional basketball and the other went on to become a
policeman. (I mention it only because
Jeff and I met Pembrook Burrows, the seven-footer who wasn’t Artis Gilmore and
the most famous person we met in high school other than Alice Cooper.) Jeff, although he didn’t surf, he looked like a surfer:
Tanned-with-long-blond-hair, only in Jeff’s case his tan was from playing
basketball outside every day after school with his tanned-with-long-brown-hair
best friend, me. Our common love for rock
and roll, playing basketball and being virtually unproductive in any way, shape
or form contributed to us being the best of friends. That and we were pretty good at using Tim as
the scapegoat for most of the trouble we got into during our high school
years.
Like that
one winter night back in 1972.
Every
Tuesday and Thursday night during our junior year our entourage went to the
high school gym to play full-court basketball for a couple of hours. Surprising as it may sound, we often played
in pickup games against members of our varsity team and most of the time held
our own…except for the nights when both of the Anthony brothers played. Imagine two LeBron James’ playing against
seventh-graders and you get an idea of what those nights were like. Afterwards we would go to the local
convenience store and get four 16-ounce Nehi Grape Sodas and have our bi-weekly
belching contest. (Belches were scored
on a scale of one to 10. For a perfect
’10 there had to be visual evidence as well as audible evidence of the belch. No one ever scored a perfect ’10,’ but Tim
came close a couple of times on the days his belches smelled an awful lot an
ice cream sandwich.
On this
particular Thursday night we were drinking our Nehi’s in my parents’ Chevy
Malibu (I was driving) on our way to Rodney’s house to drop him off. That’s when we saw his two-houses-down neighbor,
cute-as-a-button 10th-grade cheerleader Becky standing in her front
yard saying goodnight to her 12th-grade boyfriend Joey. Joey was perhaps the richest and in all
probability the butt ugliest boy in the entire student body, not to mention the
owner of an infinite wardrobe of white pants.
Jeff, sitting in the front passenger seat rolled his window down and began
screaming at the top of his lungs for Becky to DUMP THE SCRAWNY RUG-HEAD!!!
(Joe was every bit of 120 pounds with hair resembling a light brown Brillo pad. I might add he looked like the end of a pug. The back end.) So a couple hundred yards later as we’re
approaching Rodney’s house, Jeff asks me to turn around and head back to
Becky’s house: He wasn’t finished. As I
did a quick U-turn in the middle of the road Jeff jumped in the back seat,
rolled down the window and was ready to pick up where he left off from our
first drive-by. Thirty seconds, seven or eight insults and a quarter of a mile
later I now have to turn around one more time to drop Rodney off at his house.
And pass by
Becky’s house one more time. Believe me:
This third time was no charm.
As we pass
by the cheerleader’s house, you’ll never guess who came screeching out of the
driveway in his convertible.
Yep. The scrawny rughead, in hot pursuit of our
entourage.
We passed by
Rodney’s house at 65 miles per hour. Tim
tried to get Rodney to jump out the door and hit the ground rolling ‘like they
do on TV’ so we wouldn’t have to come by later to drop him off. You know, after I did my job behind the wheel
and lost Joe and his convertible.
Joe followed
us for a good 25 minutes as I drove up and down every road in Neptune Beach at
break-neck speeds trying to lose him. I
was doing quite well until I hit a red-light on Penman Road and Joe pulled up
next to me. (Note: Penman Road is a
two-lane so yes, Joe was sitting at the red light on the wrong side of the road
and facing oncoming traffic so he could be next to me.) He looked right at me and I immediately
looked to my entourage to gauge their reactions. I had a hard time doing so, because all of them
were lying on the floorboard of the car.
Cowards. As far as Joe knew, it
was mano e mano: Just me and him. As far
as he was concerned it was me—and only me insulting his size, his hair and his
girl. Joe would certainly get his
revenge tomorrow: In school where he could afford to pay someone to remind the
Nehi Kid it wasn’t nice to ridicule the cute cheerleader and her
scrawny-but-oh-so-rich boyfriend while they were playing kissy-face in the
front yard.
I dreaded
Friday morning. Did Joey hire the
Anthony brothers to teach me a lesson?
Did he line up the entire football team—the one Becky cheered for every
Friday night in the fall—to throw their weight around? Did he donate money to the Teachers’ Lounge
Remodeling Fund so Rodney’s mom would remind me how much I didn’t know about
slide rules?
As it turned
out nothing happened. I can’t say why
for sure, but I do know I passed Joey in the hall at least twice during the
day. I also know my face pretty much
looked the same as it did 12 hours before—when Joey looked directly at it from
a distance of no more than 15 feet.
The only
thing unusual about this particular Friday was Tim’s shirt. Or rather the verbiage written on a sheet of
paper torn out of a spiral notebook and Scotch-taped on his back:
Joey: It was me.
I never did
find out if it was Rodney or Jeff I should have thanked.
Or Tim
should have murdered.
No comments:
Post a Comment