By: Travis Aligo In June of 1980, on a rather balmy evening, I sat upon the cool concrete of George Miner Elementary School and toasted another bottle of beer to friends and we drank and drank, until we were "high school drunk." We had gathered here most weekends through out the last three years, getting raging drunk and carousing through the wee hours, smoking marijuana, telling jokes, laughing like the drunken hyenas we were. There was no ambition for us waster lings, no questions of college after summer, no fantastic jobs lined up for us, and for sure, no cute chicks, and certainly we entertained no dreams of conquering the world as we saw it that balmy San Jose night, the night that followed graduation, when we were free of the friends and relatives and that assemblage of high school seniors, those teachers, on that awfully busy day at the Oak Grove High School, Graduation Day. I knew it was an awfully important day, Deano knew, Rob and Mikey, and Jay and Larry and Jeff and the other Mike R. and yet the other Mike, Mike C. The importance hung about our wastrel minds, as we imbibed the spirit of Mickey, The Big Mouth, that sainted, golden, powerful liquid that we reserved for only the most "on-high" occasions, those occasions calling for the touch of drunkenness in the first few guzzles. So there we sat, Indian-style, in a circle, swilling from the green, large mouthed beer bottles, Mikey torching another sow bug with his trusty lighter, he killed tens of the bugs that crept out of the ivy, usually by setting a bottle cap over them and watching as the caps appeared to take on a life of their own, dragging back and forth on the concrete, like little bumper cars, then he would heat up the bottle caps with his lighter, and generally one of us would jump on him to stop the torture, and end up in a massive dog pile, Deano, Rob, Mikey, Jay, Larry, and Jeff, and the two other Mikes, Mike R. and Mike C., all for the love of saving one or two sow bugs from the hellfire of Mikey's torch. Jay slurred that he was "so fuggin' wasted," and we laughed because of the way he said it, and our laughter filled our ears, and it was possibly only I who'd thought at just that moment that we would never pass this way again, our youth was fleeing, and within a few years, this would all be gone and left, alive only in our constantly shifting memories, to become our "high school years." I proposed a toast, and a promise was extracted from everyone present. In twenty years, no matter where we were in the world, we would all get together and have to meet in the center of the Golden Gate Bridge in the year 1999, on New Year's Eve. This ignited a round of boisterous conversation and argument because, as Jay stated, "Fuggin' TravAss! How are we gonna get to the Golden Gate Bridge, on New Years Eve, it'll be so fuggin' crowded?!" Jay Krafty, local curmudgeon, and a pain in the ass all through my Junior High School Years, where we had band together, when I played second chair trumpet to Jeff Wilner's first chair. (Years later I was getting stoned at a friend's, Tom, he of the sister with the biggest gazoombas, and heard 'ol Jeff practicing his Trumpet, as he lived next door to Tom. He really made that thing sing. I was a year out of trumpet and marching band at the time, and had always wondered how Jeff had gotten so good.) Jay played, of all things, clarinet, and he was never any good, he was terrible, in fact. When we recorded the Herman Junior High School Band during a concert performance, it is Jay's squeaky clarinet that can be heard, painfully, throughout the record. Jay spent his music career at Herman Junior High torturing me with his, "Hey, TravASS!" and I would feed into this and I always ended up chasing him around the music room, trying to pound him into respectful submission. So the debate raged and we settled on Miner Tree. The poor Miner Tree, the scraggly little tree out at George Miner Elementary, out past the ball park proper, that dangling little tree that we would surround like a bunch of moths at a street lamp, drinking beer and pissing on it into the night and how we'd theorize we were replenishing it and growing this little tree all through our high school years with our own Mickey's Big Mouth urine. This tree was going to be the meeting place for the new millennium in twenty years, and as we dreamed of where we'd all be, the conversation was broken by the arrival of Jimbo, the infernal gadfly, that ambitious son-of-a-bitch, who was always getting us into parties with the High School Intelligentsia, getting us to hobnob with The |
People With Whom We Attended High School But Swore Never To Hang With. I grew up with Jimbo years before I'd grown up with my current group of High School buddies, and he was always in my orb, mostly because he was never quite accepted into the cool crowd, and kept me as a line to a crowd, period, because in the final analyses, high school was about nothing more than belonging to something. So we were off again that night, in a drunken haze to visit a round of parties and dances with girls, and drinking beer from keggers, only later to return to George Miner Elementary because we could never really leave the damn place that had given our high school years so much sustenance and variety, not to mention being a very righteous place to puke late into those endless summer evenings. Twenty years later the remnants of the group met at Miner Tree in the field of George Miner Elementary School, on New Year's Eve, 1999. There were only three of us, Mike R., Dean and I. For a variety of reasons, Mikey, Rob, Larry, and Mike C., were unable to make the "Twenty-year-promise-Reunion". Jeff was nowhere to be found, he'd sold his construction company the past year, bought an RV and, rumor had it, was somewhere roaming America. Jay had died that past October from complications of a bleeding ulcer. I was headed up to San Francisco, to hang with my cousin, because I wanted to be right at ground zero when the Millennium Bug hit. I didn't really believe anything would happen, but I also didn't have anywhere else to go. I couldn't convince any of my buddies to go up with me, they all had kids and lives now and even the other lone bachelor, Mike R. was going to be spending his time at a family reunion of sorts. However, we did agree to meet at the Miner Tree. It was a nice day, if a little cool. I walked across the grass from the parking lot and it didn't seem as long a walk as it did all those years ago, when we were generally apt to be prowling after dark. It seemed a much smaller place now. There was a huge fence now around George Miner Elementary, to keep kids out of the inner circle of buildings. A generation of kids had turned George Miner Elementary School into a party spot and it was heartening and dispiriting at the same time to think that we had begun that trend so many years ago when we were just starting out in the world. Miner Tree was no longer the scraggly tree that inhabited my high school memory. I had it in the back of my mind that all those years of peeing on the tree had surely stunted it's growth or killed it years ago, but there it was, over twenty feet tall and as healthy a tree as I ever looked upon! I was pleasantly dumbfounded! I gave bear hugs to Dean and Mike R. We were really glad to have met like this. Dean had brought his wife and now three children, and it was awfully great to see those kids enjoying the park we had enjoyed all those years ago when we were in high school. We shot rockets into the air, Dean was a rocket-launching hobbyist, in addition to his job in Silicon Valley as a Microwave Technician, and the kids chased down those rockets when they finished their grand arcs across the fields of George Miner Elementary. Mike R., who'd had cancer in high school and barely survived,(I'd come to believe that we were all good for each other at that time) had gone on to a career in microchip technology, earning several patents along the way. He wanted to follow me to San Francisco that day, but couldn't get out of his prior commitments. Mike R., Dean, and I surveyed the school grounds, speaking of the many years we had trudged since high school, how everything had "come out", and old "what's-his-name", he of the sister with the indefatigable breasts, and good 'ol Jay, and the way he used to slur when he was drunk. How his slurring was always the indicator, like a weather vane, of how the party was progressing. We spoke about our lives and how we'd gotten on, and yet there was as much unspoken. The silence between us was the indefinable gap that by course of right grows up between old friends as they grow apart and experience lives separate from one another, and the discoveries each has comprehended apart from all the others. We said our goodbyes and I walked back to my car. Sitting there, I felt the melancholy that had arisen over this, finally, anti-climactic meeting twenty years into the future. I believed the commonality that remained between us that day, that which was uppermost in our minds, were the years that had fled beyond us. And yet we remained the same, with the same hopes, the same wishes, and the same perpetually youthful need to hear the laughter, our own, and hear it with our own ears. |