The details of those years are unimportant and certainly not unusual. Billy had a ’69 Camaro (the last year that car made any difference) with a 327 under the hood and Hi-Jackers in the rear. There was a Pioneer eight-track mounted under the AM radio and two Superthruster speakers on the rear panel. On weekend nights we drank Schlitz from cans and raced that car up and down University Boulevard and Colesville Road, trolling for girls and parties. On the nights when we got too drunk the cops would pull us over and, in those days, simply tell us to get on home. Our friends enacted roughly the same ritual, and amazingly none of us died.
I had part-time work as a stock boy, but on the days I had off, Billy and I shot hoops. Every Saturday afternoon we’d blow a monster joint, then head down to Candy Cane City in Rock Creek Park and engage in pickup games for hours on end. The teams always ended s oup being “salt and pepper,” and the losers did push-ups. Billy had a cheap portable eight-track player, and on those rare occasions when we’d win, he would blast J Geils’s “Serve You Right to Suffer” over the bobbing heads of the losing team. Eventually our overconfidence (and the desire to unearth the wet treasures that simmered beneath the red panties of our Blazer cheerleading squad) pushed us to try out for the varsity team, but Billy didn’t have the heart and I, in truth, lacked the ability. The day we were cut we walked the path in the park and, with laughter and some degree of relief, split a bumper of beer and huffed half a pack of Marlboros.
After graduation Billy, who had already been accepted to an out-of-state school, took a construction job, and I continued to work as a stock boy at Nutty Nathan’s on Connecticut Avenue. The prospect of another humid season carrying air conditioners up and down stairs was upon me, so when a customer I had befriended offered me the opportunity to tow his ski boat down to the Keys for two hundred bucks, I accepted. Billy’s construction job was kicking his ass so he asked to come along. I secured a leave of absence from Nathan’s with the help of my friend and mentor Johnny McGinnes; Billy simply quit. We made plans to stay in D.C. through the Fourth of July and leave the following day.
The summer of ’76 was not just the tail end of my childhood, a fact of which even then I was vaguely aware, but also the end of an optimistic era for an entire generation. The innocence of marijuana had not yet, to use the most emblematic example, become the horror of cocaine, and the economic and political emergence of minorities hadn’t yet been crushed by the moral bankruptcy of the Reagan years. But our Bicentennial celebration reflected none of this, and what I witnessed on Independence Night was simply the most spectacular party ever thrown in downtown D.C.
The next day Billy and I prepared to leave. We attached a hitch to his car (mine, a ’64 Valiant with push-button transmission on the dash, never would have made it), changed his oil, and filled up the tape box. The tapes we were to return to most were Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance (I can’t hear “Kill Your Sons” now without the druggy heat of that summer burning through my memory), Robin Trower’s Twice Removed from Yesterday, Bowie’s Station to Station, Hendrix’s mind-blowing Axis: Bold as Love, and the debut from Bad Company. We cut the black BAD CO. logo off that tape’s carton and glued it, facing out, on the Camaro’s windshield, to let any doubters know just who we were. There was also the odd business of a plastic grenade hung from the rearview, and a new bumper sticker that read MOTT THE HOOPLE: TELL CHUCK BERRY THE NEWS. For recreation we had copped, from Johnny McGinnes, an ounce of Mexican, a vial filled to the lid with black beauties, and half a dozen tabs of purple haze; there were also several packs of Marlboros scattered on the dash. We were eighteen years old and certain that the world’s balls were in our young hands.
And so we took off. We put together four hundred dollars between us, and our plan was to travel around the South until the money ran out. Billy picked me up, and my grandfather stood and watched us from the front of our apartment house, tight-lipped and with his hands dug deep into his pockets, until we were out of sight. His shoulders were hunched up, and he grew smaller in the rearview as we headed down the block.
A half hour later we had secured the Larson on thewerarson o hitch of the Camaro and said good-bye to the surprisingly trusting owner of the boat. We stopped once more for a cold six-pack, got on the Capital Beltway, and headed for 95 South.
That night we pulled into Virginia Beach and crashed at the place of a friend who was working in a pizza parlor for the season. In the grand tradition of resort employee living quarters, there were several burnouts staying in his two-room flat, where pot was always lit and the TV and stereo were always competing in loud unison. Since there were no cooking facilities, I can only guess that these guys ate pizza the entire summer. The decor consisted of a fisherman’s net tacked to the wall (during our stay someone had hung a dead sea bass in its webbing) and a bright green carpet, which was stained alternately with puke and bong water. The next day we swam and then in the early evening Billy and I each ate a tab of purple haze and bought tickets to the B. B. King show at the local civic auditorium. We arrived and found we were the youngest and most sloppily dressed in the mostly black crowd of oldish fans, some of whom were sweating through their three-piece suits and evening dresses in the liquid heat. I began to get off on the acid during a tune where Mr. King sang, with his hands off Lucille and one fist clenched, “I asked my baby for a nickel / She gave me a fifty-dollar bill / I asked my baby for a sip of whiskey / She gave me the whole gotdamn still.” Billy and I smoked joints for the rest of the show to notch us down, and the folks around us were all quite happy to join in. I kept a log on that trip, in which I critiqued B. B. King’s performance in the following manner: he had “turned that shit out.” Afterward a bespectacled guy wearing khaki shorts and a pith helmet accompanied us as we wandered from one late-night establishment to the next, fluorescently lit cafes that were indistinguishable in that they glowed and buzzed with identical intensity. We lost our friend sometime before dawn and ended up on the beach for what I thought was the most blazingly orange sunrise I had ever seen. Billy was sleeping by then, with his face in the sand, and I watched his body twitch as a deerfly continually had its way with his leg. I never once thought to brush it away.
We slept that morning and, after stopping to say goodbye to our host (he was scarfing down a slice of pizza as he waved us off), headed south. The drive lasted into the evening and ended when we pulled into a motel called the Pennsylvania on Twenty-first Street in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We hung out on the beach and swam the next two days in the piss-warm wavelets of the Atlantic. On the second night we felt rejuvenated enough to party and returned to it with a vengeance. By the time we got to the Spanish Galleon, the resort’s most popular nightclub, which was packed with raucous innocents (in a way that only Southern bars can be), Billy and I were raped on beer and tequila and determined to score. We had by now developed a contest involving the number of women we could rack up on the trip (Billy dubbed it our “cock test”), and I immediately crossed a busy concrete dance floor where college kids were doing the shag to Chairman of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” and proceeded to slip my tongue into the mouth of a hideous but willing biker queen who had been standing by herself. From out of the corner of my eye I could see Billy laughing as I rolled my tongue in her cankerous orifice, and now, with spiteful determination, I led her out to the beach for the long walk down to the surf where I “made love” to her near the breakers. After I came in her doughy box her face changed from the merely ugly to the truly frightening, and when she demanded that I “fuck” her again, I obeyed, her oily black hair buried in the sand by my dutiful thrusts. Somehow I lost her in the Go ther in alleon and hitched to the motel, where an unrelenting Billy was waiting for me with an evil grin. For the next three days he teased me about the clap (and every time I urinated I could hear his laughter outside the bathroom door), but miraculously it didn’t surface, and the next morning, my head pounding and down in disgust, we left Myrtle and continued south.