Friday, October 10, 2008
Two winters ago I heard from my brother that someone I’d been close to in high school had died. I hadn’t kept up with anyone from high school, so I wasn’t aware that anything was up. I later heard from other classmates who were reaching out to try to get their heads around losing someone we knew so well a long time ago, and so young.
It was suggested that we all write up some memories and stories and put them together in some format to give as a gift to his parents. That never happened, but I just found some notes that I’d written down while looking for something else, so I thought I’d toss them up here so they don’t get lost. No particular order:
- going to railroad square cinema (the old one, before it burned) to see a movie that played nowhere else (one of the tournee of animation movies, Wings of Desire, Stop Making Sense, etc.) and going to the Dunkin Donuts on Main St. in Waterville afterwards, hanging out with the regulars, drinking coffee at 11pm with a donut
- the look on his face when that Augusta cop who’d been woken from his Friday night donut-induced haze and had had to drive over 100 MPH to catch us racing down Western Ave saw that we were just a couple of 15 year old kids
- sloe gin fizz
- funyuns
- “fairly decent”
- “mortibund”
- buying a pizza for lunch at Mario’s nearly every day, eating it when it was too hot, always burning the top of his mouth
- all the concerts
- Aerosmith in Augusta, my first concert, and the one where BP squeezed a tube of toothpaste hard enough that the top popped off and got all over some guy in front of us
- Grateful Dead in Augusta and Portland
- Rush – I don’t remember that show at all due to my choice of mind alteration for the evening but do remember having a great time hanging out eating pizza with some deadheads we hooked up with after the show
- funky old Saab 93s and 94s with windows that didn’t roll straight up but pivoted at the front, gas gauges that were nonlinear to reflect the actual shape and actual volume of gas in the tank
- One of those Saabs catching on fire at Cumberland Farms, me laughing at the absurdity of the situation, him pissed that it was happening and more pissed that I was laughing. The carburator had a small leak, so after running for a while there was a risk that the hot engine could ignite the leaked fuel while you were sitting still with the engine off, which is what happened; I noticed that the paint was bubbling on the hood, and he leapt out of the car with his fire extinguisher to put out yet another small fire
- he didn’t know much about car engines, but he thought the “slant 6″ in his (or his parents’?) Dodge Dart was pretty impressive. We’d bought a Pontiac Ventura because it had become cheaper to buy a cheap car and insure me just for that than to stay on my Mom’s policy after several infractions. It had a v8 350 and I must have mentioned that it was a powerful car (not that I was particularly proud of the car, it wasn’t really mine except on paper) and he, being the competetive person that he was, bragged that a slant 6, due to its configuration was a far better motor than a larger v8. To prove otherwise, I took him and JF for a ride one day after school. I picked him up first, then went to JF’s place, so he was in front and JF in the back. I didn’t have much of a plan for proving the abilities of the car, but I remember stepping hard on the gas a few times to show off the acceleration and it had some serious power. I wasn’t experienced driving a rear wheel drive and ended up fishtailing into a ditch
- taking the audio engineering course, those 2 new wave guys from camden, trying to run cables to the bathroom to record like the Doors had done
- rush, talking heads, windham hill artists, led zeppelin, Tangerine Dream