Memories from Growing Up (Part 1)

Today I got caught up thinking about some of my childhood friends. In my earliest entries, I talk about how I drove back through my old neighborhood in the middle of the night. I told you about how dark it was, and how the only light was coming from the flickering amber street lights. Old school ones, with the q-tip looking light held up by a wooden pole. Probably got put up in 1973 or something.

I told you about how my old house never had a garage, it had a car port. A lot of houses were like that, since they were built in the 1950's. They were houses that were all one-story, with low-peaking roofs. My street didn't have a side walk. The pavement was cracked and rough. It was like God poured tar on a path and tossed a bunch of rocks on it.

My brother and I used to hang around with the kids on our street and at our bus stop. They were all delinquents, really. There was Lenny, Eddie, Mikey, Jeremy, Nathan and Chris. Some others came and went over the years, like a neo-nazi kid named Matt who got expelled from school for shooting another kid in the leg with a b.b. gun at the bus stop. Such drama never really effected anyone, as this was the type of thing that would go on with these kids everyday hanging out. Most of them were latch-key kids, who knew no rules.

Lenny was a black kid that lived three doors down. He was always real aloof, but always wanted to hang out. Me and my brother used to hang out at his house with him and his 16 year old sister. She would be playing Snoop Dogg tapes and we'd be playing Mortal Kombat with the blood code. He would tell his sister to turn off her music and put on some classical. We'd play basketball or street football until 9 at night, drinking mountain dew and swatting mosquitoes off of our sweaty arms until our parents made us come inside.

My brother and I were bored as hell, tossing around the football in the yard when Eddie first showed up. I remember him appearing down the street near the stop sign, acted like he knew exactly where he was going. He stopped and played a whole game of football with us before he even told us his name. I said, "where are you living?" and he pointed right next door to my house.

Two doors down from Eddie was Mikey. His mom was like 15 when she had him, so his grandma was the authority in the house, if you want to call her that. He was a spacey, dreamy kid. Always slightly sad and down, like a little puppy dog. He was imaginitive, and would love to tell ghost stories under my car port in the winter time, when the days were darker. Years down the road, Mikey reappeared in my high school drawing class when I was 18. He wasn't doing so good those days.

Then there were two brothers that lived around the corner, Nate and Chris. They would get into fights during basketball games, and would yell at each other so loudly that my mom could hear them a block away. Nathan was tempermental but Chris was just as bad. Their dad was where they got it from. I remember they would say that they would eat steak every single night for dinner. There was one point where they adopted and successfully domesticated a wild racoon that wondered around their street.

Jeremy lived on Nathan and Chris' street. He was a chirping little tag-along who was actually pretty friendly to be around. His neighbor was Ethan, who was younger than all of us, but had like a 180 IQ. He liked to act tough even though he was a pip squeak. Ethan's dad looked like Lawrence, Peter Gibbons' longhaired neighbor in the movie Office Space.

There were endless days of driveway basketball, street football, and bike rides to 7-11 to get Slurpee's. We rarely hung out inside someone's house, all I can remember is playing in the street.

There was a number of other characters that lived in my strange neighborhood. There was an odd family that lived next door to Lenny who was rumored to perform weird rituals around a statue of some Jesus-like figure in a robe. Lenny's bedroom was right next to their house, and he claimed he could hear them chanting in the living room next door. He said he snuck out of his window and spied on them sitting in a circle, bowing down to this statue.

One time when I was 12 there was a black car with tinted windows parked outside of my house for 3 days straight. It would leave at the end of each day, but return early the next morning. My mom got so curious, she went up to it and knocked down the window. Down came the window and out came a hand holding an FBI badge. She asked why they were there, and the agent pointed straight to that family's house.

Then there was a girl who lived across the street from Lenny who's mom was a stripper and one night drove her car straight into the house because she was so high on drugs.

The day came when my family moved out of the neighborhood when I was 18. We moved into a quiet gated community once my dad was offered a better job at another bank. The houses in this neighborhood reminded me of cans stacked on the shelves of a grocery store. They all looked the same, with identical black mailboxes, each with a little red flag on them. The kids in this neighborhood used to wear helmets when they rode their bikes. Folks were so kind and friendly. They would smile and wave to passing cars as they walked their little dogs on the sidewalk. There was a man made pond near the gate that was home to a flock of ducks that were so overweight from constantly being fed by the neighbors.

I have no stories from this neighborhood, really. It was quite boring in comparison to the endless activity that preoccupied my old stomping grounds. I would sometimes hear about what happened to some of my childhood friends. I never knew what happened to Eddie. Jeremy still lives there. Rumor was that Lenny turned gay. Nathan joined the military. Chris works at a grocery store. Mikey has been in and out of jail. Ethan is dead.

There were random points in my late teens when I would run into these characters again, after moving to another town. They always seemed happy to see me. They would greet me with a big smile and say my name like I was a long lost friend. And maybe I was. Maybe those long summer nights were the brightest times of their lives.

Excerpt from Diary of a Corporate Burnout