A Summer of These Nights

[Pippa]

[This is weird for me to be blogging here twice in one week*]

My brother, Johnny, is one of my best friends. Sometimes I find myself forgetting that he is my older brother, part of the family that I generally resent. We share the same gene pool, the same brown eyes, and the same childhood. Johnny was born only 13 months before I appeared on the scene. We were close enough in age to be put in the same grade for kindergarten but split up when I was sent to pre-first and Johnny went straight on to elementary school. Maybe we weren't always so close but by the time we reached high school we found going to all-boys and all-girls schools respectively meant that the only boys I met were Johnny's friends and the only girls he met were my friends. Now, you can barely draw a line between Johnny's friends and Pippa's friends.

And so it wasn't strange for Johnny to call me at 11:00 on a Tuesday night drunk out of his mind. "House party he said at Dauses' place."

I had just finished an early movie night with my girlfriends. It was a Disney feature - Beauty and the Beast. Fitz and Bridget were the last to leave, only after a wardrobe change as they too were headed off to a party. Mom and Dad were already asleep.

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," I texted Johnny. No time for a full wardrobe change so I threw on one of what Johnny calls my "hipster Sean scarves." I considered my options: a note saying I had gone to Emily's for a late night swim/hot tub and would be sleeping there (lie), no note and sleep at Dauses' and come up with a lie for Mom tomorrow (risky), or no note and just leave but be home before Mom leaves for work at 4 AM and sees the car is gone.

I decided to make no decision and so I left the house without a plan and with no explanation. This was not the first time and certainly not the last time I had gone out under these circumstances. This is what being a teenager is all about.

Dauses, a guy I had never met and knew only through his lacrosse skills, lived in a perfectly ordinary suburban house. It could have been any house in any town across America. Hadn't I spent at least one night a week in some variation of this house for the past four years of high school. Parents are away, park down the street because neighbors are suspicious, don't look at any family photos but proceed straight down to the basement.

I know every detail of this night by heart. There are the empty pizza boxes on the kitchen counter. Through the glass door to the porch I can see the dots of light at the end of cigarettes in the darkness. There's the sweet old family dog who is excited but confused by having so many new people around at night. I can hear music coming from the open door to the basement and sure enough I can now hear the unmistakable sounds of a good game of Beiruit, lots of sporatic yelling and cursing.

This is not the "teen party" of the 90's teen movies. There's no keg. The house isn't packed with every kid in town. There isn't a line for the bathroom. No pounding music. Maybe those parties do exist but not for very long because someone always calls the cops. And so by the summer after senior year, "house party" means your ten maybe fifteen friends hanging out in an empty house.

Play some Beirut (beer pong). Drink some beer (Coors will run out fast and you'll be left with Natural Light piss). Smoke too many cigarettes. Smoke a few bowls. Take some shots (handle of vodka/rum/whiskey purchased for the extravagant price of $12.99). Don't ask where Tori is (doing coke in the guest bedroom). Trade stories and talk until night becomes morning.

It's not the night that I love. It's the people and the stories and the friendships formed in Dauses' kitchen laughing at each other.

"Maybe I run with the wrong crowd," said Joe, who was just fired from his job as a pirate tour guide on an old, historic ship. He had just wondered out loud when one of his friends would be getting out of jail ("He did not deserve a year and a half!") and then listened as Johnny recounted a tale of going to church while on acid. Dan just walked by with his two hundred dollar bong and Tori was still up in that guest bedroom.

"No," I said, "You run with the best crowd."

Maybe it's our parents' worst nightmare. Sex, drugs, alcohol.

But these are my summer nights.

In the basement, Johnny is talking philosophy. Ryan is playing the guitar. There's a book of poetry sitting on the table open to a William Carlos Williams poem.

"These
are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man."

This poem about the tragedy of war should seem out of place but I reread it several times before setting it down.

"Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing - that is now stone."

What does it mean here in this basement room? Well, it means that on an ordinary night of extraordinariness I found a moment of pure, unexpected beauty.


----
That is all. A little bit of one crazy girl's musings. Some of the stuff I wrote about might not seem very nerdfighterly but I believe that being a nerdfighter isn't about how I spend my summer nights but about my love of learning, my love of literature, my love of that William Carlos Williams poem.



*I have another, real blog but I'm taking the summer off so I guess right now this is my primary blog. It's different because I don't feel obliged to update every day so I can just come by and write something whenever I feel like it. Take this post for example. I just felt like writing about last night and my various experiences. I'm sure it's not particularly interesting to anyone but I just felt like writing it down for myself so I did. It's not so much in blog post form, more narrative as I thought of writing it as a short story but was lazy.

[Kitashi]

Reading your recollection reminded me of the writing style used in The Grapes of Wrath. I'm not a reader, so I may just sound like a 'tard when I say that, but it's true that your writing style did remind me of the writing style from that book!