© Tim Peeler, 2019
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We left the high school basketball game, hyped on adrenaline and testosterone. Four high school seniors, football players all, headed towards a Christmas gathering at our friend Donnie’s, where there were girls, the same ones that had turned us down every time we asked them out in homeroom.
The party wasn’t far away, maybe four miles. We were all
revved up with somewhere to go.
Driving my car, with a freshly rebuilt, more powerful
engine, my friend Brad was riding shotgun. We did a lot of stupid stuff together in
those days. He broke into his family’s lake house – lake trailer, really – so we
could take our junior prom dates there. He climbed through a secretly unlocked
window in a rented tux and we grilled steaks that another one of our crew
procured from the restaurant where he worked.
In the other car were two offensive linemen, Big Tom and
Carp. Between them, they weighed about 550 pounds. Their combined weight kept
the car snug on the road, much better than any rear spoiler ever could.
The four of us had known each other since we started playing
Optimist Club football together at the age of 8.
Pulling out of the high school parking lot, we started
acting the fool. I tried to pass Big Tom. He tried to pass me. We tailgated
each other. We buzzed by each other. Generally acting like immature teenagers
we so obviously were. Fortunately, there were no other cars on the road.
Approaching Warlick Hill, a one-mile stretch of Highway 27
that went straight up heading west, we both went into overdrive. I was just behind
Big Tom’s back bumper, drafting unpolished chrome. I downshifted, pulled into
the other lane, ready to make my hero move.
We could basically hear the strains of every teenaged car
crash song ever released, from “Last Kiss” to “Deadman’s Curve” to “Bat Out of
Hell.” In fact, one of our good friends had wrecked in a near-fatal accident on
that very hill a year before.
If either of us had a girl in our car or a working back window or deer antlers on the roof, it would have been just like that stupid car scene in Footloose.
If either of us had a girl in our car or a working back window or deer antlers on the roof, it would have been just like that stupid car scene in Footloose.
Just as my car inched ahead of him, engines roaring like the
last weekend in May, the blue lights came on. We hadn’t notice the sedan
following us up the hill. We were all screwed, our futures flying out the
window like Baby Face Nelson’s folding money in that Coen brothers movie.
The highway patrolman yanked us unkindly out of our cars, still
wearing his mirrored shades that late night, oozing both anger and a slight sense
of…laughter?
We sat there on my 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, a hand-me-down
from my two sisters with scars of multiple engine rebuilds. Tom and Carp leaned
on the hood of his 1978 Toyota sport station wagon, wood side panels muting the
glare of the flashing blue lights.
“I really should charge you both with drag racing,” he said
to me and Big Tom, “which is the most dangerous and stupidest thing you can do
in a moving vehicle. But neither of you ever got over 34 miles an hour the
whole time I was following you.
“If anything, I should charge you for driving too slowly on a
state highway.”
We made it to the Christmas party, just a few minutes late.
Every single person there had seen us pulled over on the side of road.
None of
us left with any dates.