Reason to Believe, Part One
April 14, 2010 by admin
Filed under living with me
The end of the story.
This was the last picture that night. I was probably 21 at the time. I carefully removed everyone’s eyes from the photograph (except mine) because the people with me are in the photograph are either way too successful or way too dead to have their picture running at my place.
Friday nights we did everything as a group, Saturday nights were theme nights, and on any given Sunday we would be together from noon until about 8 p.m.
In my opinion, theme nights were my favorite because we only chose themes where we thought we would look really great. There were probably close to 25 or 30 of us and everything was carefully planned using a land line telephone. We never announced the theme until Saturday at noon because we didn’t want any of the other girls having enough time to plan how they could look better than us.
One of the guys we hung out with had a farm house and we’d usually start there with solids before we switched to liquids. In the seventies we weren’t afraid of drunk driving and sexually transmitted diseases hadn’t been invented so we were truly invincible.
The beginning of the story.
Three of us shared an apartment. Two of us were close friends since kindergarten and I was the other one. I took the place of the one that girl that left for college. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now – those are dynamics that never work.
We had great parties. Seriously great parties. Three girls lived upstairs, three boys lived downstairs. The boys cut the grass and shoveled the snow because we pretended we didn’t know how.
Fridays were wild in our two-family home. We’d get home from work, clean and do a week’s worth of dishes. One floor of the house would play the music loud enough for the entire building, most of the time it was Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell. Our throats would be raw from screaming lyrics before we even left the apartment for the night.
We were young. We traded clothes and secrets, we were going to be friends forever. We drove each others’ cars, hugged each others’ boyfriends, ate each others’ food, and did each others laundry. We lent each other money, paid each other back, and screamed when the perfect song came on at the perfect moment. Damn, we were loud.
I smoked for a weekend. I’ve rarely admitted that fact, but I’m telling you now. I smoked one pack on Friday night, the second pack on Saturday night, and another pack Sunday afternoon. That would be my addictive personality, I guess. Merit Methol was the brand I smoked, I liked the way the pack looked. I even bought sunglasses that matched the cigarette pack. And after three days of hard core smoking my lungs hurt so I quit.
The incredibly long middle of the story.
We dated softball players. Don’t quote me on this one, but at the time I thought it might have been some kind of crazy ass Wisconsin law. I mean, every girl I knew was dating a softball player. And every girl knew also could tell how good a guy would be by what position he played in the softball game. Don’t think we didn’t notice how quick a catcher could go from his knees to an upright position. Don’t think we didn’t notice how fast a shortstop could switch off between second base and third base without missing a beat. We saw it all. We even knew that the guys who were all talk about playing the field but couldn’t really produce ended up right field. We just knew.
One of the best parts about dating softball players were the tournaments. It was like the World Series every single weekend. Particulars were well planned. We didn’t have cell phones. Hell, we didn’t even have cordless phones. Four couples shared two vehicles. Usually the guys caravanned, four per vehicle and the girls came an hour later also four to a car. Gas prices weren’t outrageous, cars were inexpensive and music came on eight-tracks.
On one particular World Series tournament weekend, I was the designated driver. In the seventies that meant you were the one designated to drive. It had nothing to do with starting sober, remaining sober and being a responsible sober person for the duration of the evening. It simply meant you were the one that was designated to do the driving.
We were all crammed into my Ford Pinto, yes it was green. I had a serious juke box with a deafening pair of speakers. They weren’t the little pansy ass box speakers either, these were serious speakers that needed special holes drilled into the flat area between the seat and the rear window. This pair of speakers came from an ex-softball-playing-boyfriend’s first generation Monte Carlo. And yes, they were way too big and powerful for my Pinto which would explain part of my popularity when it came to choosing a designated driver.
To be continued …
Yellow Mustang with black racing stripes, wine coolers, methol lites and gettin’ in all the bars without an ID … the WI right of passage.