The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. It was early June, the air soft as a hand on your cheek, the third night of summer vacation. Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mother’s Bel Air with vomit. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade “man”s with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were both expert in the social graces, quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell’ Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/head-shop proprietor. I was there one night, late, in the company of two dangerous characters. We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. The Indian had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. We read André Gide and struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything.
We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. When we wheeled our parents' whining station wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste.
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