Strings and Sealing Wax
... his beard before he had completed the 5th grade; a long-haired “hippy type” who could quickly score a lid, and whose parents allowed him to display tasteful, but revealing, Playboy centerfold pictures on his bedroom walls. Harold was a tall and unsightly red haired boy who actually owned, and wore with some level of pride, a vinyl pocket protector, and who knew how to use a slide rule with the confidence and expertise of a NASA scientist. As odd looking a trio as we must have appeared, chumming around together, the three of us each shared a similar degree of social awkwardness, as well as one other vastly more important thing: We were all “bikers” of sorts, or at least we owned and rode motorcycles as our primary, and in my case exclusive, means of transportation. We often thought of ourselves as 20th century Three Musketeers, on two wheels. We were never quite sure, however, if the inevitable quest life had assigned us was to do good, or to do evil. One memorably warm Northwest afternoon our gallant trio was out and about, marauding the neighborhoods, making mischief on our machines, when I spotted across the parking lot of the IGA grocery, a young boy, emerging from inside the store, gripping a large brown paper shopping bag in his arms in front if him. I gestured a sign to both Steve and to Harold, and together we knew that we had marked an easy victim for invasion. In single file unison, with Steve in the lead, Harold in quick pursuit, and me running up the rear, we blazed our monstrous bikes toward the young boy, and as we passed in front of him, I reached down, snatching the grocery bag from his frail arms, tucking it between my body and the crown of my saddle, leaving the young boy standing alone, dumbfounded, with an unforgettable look of shock and terror on his face. The three of us then raced off, in grand style, to our secret rendezvous where the centerfold girls were awaiting us, to inspect the spoils of our valiant plunder. With enormous anticipation, in huddle-like fashion, we encircled the bag that I had just snatched away from the defenseless young boy, and when we peered inside, we found a single layer, store-bakery, chocolate cake, decorated with pink and red confection roses, with an inscription of icing across the top that read “Happy Birthday Mom”. For some reason that afternoon, none of us felt very much like eating any cake. Steve, Harold and I spent many of our after-school evenings that year cruising together on our motor bikes, exploring the highways, roadways and alleyways of Seattle, Tacoma and all points between. Many miles of pavement could be explored for very little of our hard-earned cash in view of the 32 cent price of a gallon of gasoline. It would be more than nine months later before the Union of Arab Nations, in a retaliatory effort against the U.S. and its allies, would impose an oil embargo, bringing America to its knees, forcing odd-and-even gasoline rationing, mile long lines to the fuel pumps, and ultimately gasoline prices approaching a dollar per gallon. Throughout that year Steve, Harold and I all shared a secret friendship dream, inspired by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s cross-country road trip, in the film Easy Rider. We envisioned that after graduation ceremonies, we would gather a few essentials, mount our motorcycles and tour the entire lower forty-eight United States in freewheeling style. It was a delightful dream. We talked about it every free moment, and we mapped our plans in exquisite detail, swearing that our secret vision should be shared with no one. In a likewise small town, twenty-some miles and four high schools away, while I was away from Steve and Harold, a completely contrary facet of my life played out, in the company of my high school sweetheart Dolly T. Dolly was a hopelessly unattractive, skinny, flat-chested, schoolgirl with a dappled complexion, and stringy russet hair, but when she and I were together, in my eyes, no one could have been more beautiful. The cute little bare-bottomed couple in the popular daily comic strip “Love is.." symbolized the epitome of our togetherness, so we thought. Dolly and I had been friends since our early grade school years, but our newly shared love interest was, for each of us, our first. The relationship style that Dolly and I relished was a bit uncommon, compared to the “going steady standards” that other couples our age had established. We saw one another only on Friday evenings and Saturdays, but dated more frequently during the summer months. Dolly’s parents were rigidly strict in their religious beliefs and did not allow “boyfriend visits “on Sundays or school nights. The twenty-odd miles that separated us, was hardly a worthy obstacle for a swift moving motorbike and its hormone-driven rider, but it was ample distance for the regional phone company to apply long distance charges between our home telephones. Subsequently, the bulk of our corresponded, when we were apart from one another, was by U.S. mail. Dolly and I frequently exchanged our first-class love notes, six, eight, and sometimes ten letters per week. Between the two of us, we could quickly exhaust an entire one dollar and sixty cent book, of twenty, 8-cent postage stamps. Nearly rivaling our perpetual love for one another, we also shared a deep passion for the French language. Our linguistic enthusiasms earned us each memberships in good standing in our respective high school’s French Clubs. In an effort to quash her mother’s constant efforts to unraveled the secrets of our sweet notes to one another, we were careful to inscribe the perfume scented pages, at least to the best of our abilities, in French, with the sincere hope that her mother, unable to decipher the code, would not discover the lustful content of our passages. Sometimes, in a literal loss for words, we would use made-up French, and every perception was taken to throw Dolly’s mother off track, if the French-English dictionary was not precisely where it had last been placed. Dolly and I too, shared a wonderful dream, but not the same dream that I shared with Steve and Harold. Our dream was that, post cap-and-gown, she and I would somehow fly away to France, and spend a myriad of romantic days and evenings along the banks of the Seine. I never revealed to Dolly, the secret friendship dream that I so confidentially held with Steve and Harold. Likewise, I never shared with my two best friends the treasured dream of my passions. Perhaps a bit of me began to sense the bitter taste of realism, early that summer of 1973, as minuscule parts of each of ...