The memories aren’t always clear. They never are. It’s like a first person shot on a cheap video camera uploaded to You Tube… grainy, digitized yet still sharp with little jerky movements interspersed with slow pans.

In high school I had a friend… Jay. He was unique, confident… Jay was thin as in British rocker thin with dirty blond wavy hair in a conservative 80’s style. Cloths are a blur (insert your own jeans, tshirt or button down [untucked, please], nothing 80’s cliche, though), but not the shoes. He would switch between his canvashigh-tops or combat boots. And his car… makes and models generally leave my mind as quickly as they enter… a yellowed/tan station wagon. Older with some rust and possibly faux wood panels. Later, it changed… I vaguely recall something newer dark maroon, but that’s the car my memory always inserts. Jay could… would cruise down the streets weaving between the various clicks. He could talk to anyone and get along with most. Jay was the artist in school… drawings and I’m not sure what else. And when our lives intersected at the heaviest, he worked evenings/nights in a car wash making sure the machines all ran and the coin changer was full.

I don’t think it’s when we met, but it feels right. High school. Mark and Jay were friends. Mark said we should skip school and go hang in the park with Jay. There was fall in the air, or maybe spring. The colors were all fall… golden, brown, reds… I rode with Mark in his worn red MG. The car rounded the bend and there was Jay leaning against the wagon with his younger girlfriend. We walked around the park killing time and talking about life, music, other kids in school. Nothing more than “stuff”… but it was my first insight into freedom. Compared to Mark’s nervous energy (always expressing and wanting), Jay was relaxed and subdued. Things would happen when they happened. Jay was cool. And that’s what I saw in his girlfriend’s eyes. She worshiped him for this. Wanted to be near him to feel that. And I don’t mean cool as in “Fonzy-in-your-face-cool”. Jay was just himself, but himself fully. The high school angst that plagued the rest of us just amused him, the obviousness of it in the glint in his eye and the crook of his smile.

From time to time after that, I’d get off work and head over to the car wash before closing to see if he had plans, my goal to tag along. Sometimes I’d meet up with him as he cruised main street with the rest of the driving age youth up and down past the Forum. Other times just driving around town, smoking cigarettes and turning 2-liter bottles of coke into mixers. Once, we past a party and Jay pulled in. I asked who he knew there. With a shrug he replied “let’s find out. I think one of the girls who lives there is a lesbian.” For no obvious reason, Jay introduced himself to people on the portch with some fake name and I quickly followed suite (Hank… Chuck… something like that). The next couple of hours were fairly uneventful, for everyone but me. I relaxed. I was free to be who I wanted to be. There were no constraints forcing me to act how I thought I should act. I didn’t dance on any tables or start fights and no one paid any special notice to me. And the lesbian seemed nice when I chatted with her. But for me, there was a release… relief. <- I think that might have been Heath. See… memories aren’t good. Another time, Jay dragged me with a bunch of them to a dance, my first and probably only real dance. Attired in my wannabe Lennon sun glasses and black army trench, I was able to draw on some of that learned… copied confidence and dance. I buried the anxiety and no matter how foolish I felt, I knew my friend wouldn’t be laughing at me. And I relaxed a bit.

Where Mark had this need to try to find me a girlfriend, Jay never did. I guess he probably just didn’t care, but maybe he just felt I’d find someone when I was ready. Later I shocked Mark (and probably only amused Jay) when I met up with them both at a local watering hole with a girl I had been dating. She had been a year or two ahead of us in school and someone Mark had crushed on big time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Main real.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.