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The orb reached the top of its arc and paused, floated at the apex without regard for momentum or
gravity, reflecting the orange glow of the streetlight on its south pole and the soft blue illumination
from the moon on top, before finally surrendering to Newton and veering back down to complete the
semi-circle, the target at one end and me at the other…
You’ve got to make your own fun; you pick that up real fast going to high school in a
small town. If nothing’s going to happen, you can either sit around and bitch or get
busy doing something about it. That’s Morgan Freeman. Or Stephen King. Or Frank
Darabont even; now that I think about it, I’m not sure. All of them said it. Or something
like it. Point I’m trying to make is the older one gets, the harder it is to captivate and
entertain the evolving ever-assimilating mind. At first, a few plush animals in the playpen
are enough. Then, in the case of the typical alpha male, we move into plastic weapons
and tiny plastic men holding tiny plastic weapons. An imaginative nine-year-old might
require a myriad of toys from ten to twenty disjunctive universes to see the vision in his
mind’s eye fully wrought. Bicycles, Mustangs, Harleys, boats, lake houses, planes … boys
and the size of their toys.
But like I said. High school.
Besides the obvious teenage pursuits, ranging from carnality to Quest Through
Chemical Exploration (as Ms. Duncan put it in Honors English), my buddies and I
had many entertaining ways to kill time in the PM, most enhanced by Consumption
of Alcohol by a Minor. We talked girls into playing variations of card games like Strip
Gin or Strip Asshole with us at local coffee shops, smuggling in the last player, Captain
Morgan, inside someone’s backpack. Or we’d go water-ballooning.
Over the years, we learned from our mistakes and refined our technique to the
point that we were at our peak. Experts in the Art of Bushwhacking Moving Cars
and Trucks w/ Volleys of Exploding Rubber & Water. I can hear the satisfying thwack!
Even now. If everybody threw well, it was more like thwthtwckackk! We had a series of
locations on the northwest side of town (my folk’s neighborhood, brilliant) that, over
the years, rose up above other less opportune launching points as prime kill-zones, the
most sheltered of burrows/firing ranges within which we were safe from reprisals from
our victims.
The optimum spot: SHORT RAILROAD. Stalingrad.
It’s safe to say that from the beginning we employed questionable judgment.
Jon picked me up in his late-80s Ford Taurus, to this day the worst, most unreliable,
capricious, fickle monstrosity with a carburetor in which it has ever been my displeasure
to ride. The model in general, this piece of shit in particular. He was supposed to grab
his dad’s car for the evening but did not come through. Mine was in the shop. The folks
knew me well enough (or at least had enough of a clue - or at least my ma did) not to
entrust me with the keys to their jewels on such a beautiful evening occurring at such an
obviously chaotic time in my life. So, it had to be the Taurus.
Jon had a case of Budweiser and we popped a couple open on the way to Short
Railroad. The tail end of dusk on an early evening, the summer before our senior year.
We parked at an apartment complex about fifty yards northwest of the
intersection, tucked away over a couple hills and a little pond. That was what made it the
best spot. Approach from the south and park right by the hole in the fence. Leave the
engine running. Always. Creep through, hunched down in the shadows, and wait for a
suitable target to come barreling out of the 55 mph zone.
We stalked over and perched on the edge of the hill rising up to the northwest
corner of the intersection. When the light turned red, cars lined up four or five feet away
from us, windows down, Saturday night smoke and conversation trickling out, and no
one the wiser that the only reason their boring rhythms weren’t shattered was because
they drew the red light. When it turned green, they went off on their oblivious way and
our targets began their approach. From our unnoticeable collective crouch, we could see
them coming, had the ability to declare a candidate as Confirmed Target right up until
the last second. Once you were Confirmed, there was no way out. You were going too
fast. And were too close.
We rose as one, let sail the balloons, and the second between the throw and
contact, our action and its result, was, now that I look back on it, the point of the whole
thing. Waiting for that suspension to be lifted, to burst all over some poor bastard’s Top
40 Ace of Base existence. A microcosm of anticipation and satisfaction. The whole
world, just in that. Then the adrenaline rush to the car through that slice of wilderness.
Sometimes everyone hit, often not. Didn’t matter though, long as we all took
part. We were kind of like the Olympics that way.
It’s taken me years to catch, to really appreciate, the symbolism: the sight of that
water-balloon arcing off into the night, ascending to a peak just long enough to dangle
in-between, not fighting gravity but not surrendering either, just floating there long
enough to blow a kiss at Heaven before at last relenting, tumbling down the back half
of the rainbow, all my childhood madnesses and stupidities defined by that one point
where everything is still possible and I can snatch stars without even burning my palms,
that single apex receding even now as I fall, laughing and singed, back to the ground.
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