A few weeks ago, my old high school had a fire. It turned out to be not so big a deal, a
small fire in a heating duct that was discovered and extinguished quickly. This was a Thursday, and the administration
decided that since there was an ongoing smoke condition, school would be
cancelled on Friday and marked as a snow day.
That Friday, the sun was out, temperatures in the high 20’s, no wind,
maybe some residual snow on the ground from a previous storm.
And that got me thinking ... January and February are
such odd months that most of us just write off as a “woodshedding” time of
year. Stick to some bullshit
resolutions. Lay low. Dread Valentine’s Day. Don’t really reap the full benefits of having
MLK and Presidents Days off. Life will
start again when the weather gets better.
Growing up in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, I
viewed January and February as bleak times.
They’re bleak times anywhere, I’ve learned since. In New York, it’s a time of howling winds and
gray corner slush moats. But something
about the Coal Region: the snow, those great, black coal banks by old mines
between towns, looming like Transylvanian mountains through the fog of a
defrosting car windshield on a cold, slushy day. It was pretty god-damned depressing sometimes.
By the same token, a sunny, clear day like that Friday
the kids recently got jailbreaked from school? I can guess how elated they were. A gift like that in the dead of winter is a
great thing, and I’m certain most of them seized the day as opposed to lazing
around, Facebooking, watching shitty reality shows and pounding junk food.
What would I have been doing given similar
circumstance circa 1982, given a gift of a day like that? My high school days winding down, feeling
that directionless pull of a senior not quite sure how the world is going to
change when all this ends.
I’d have gone running, as I did every day back then. That shorter route around Hampton’s Hill (as
described here in my recent dog bite misadventure). I miss running in the morning as I recall how
relaxed I felt after working out at sunrise.
Doing the same now would require getting up before 6:00 am, and it just
aint happening. It was nothing to run
four miles in the morning, and I hated myself if I skipped for any reason,
which was rare. Snow? I loved running in snow. As noted in the dog-bite story, I was elated
to do so again recently.
After that, sure, the TV would have been on, like on a
sick day, and I’d have been drawn into shitty Love Boat/Gilligan’s Island
reruns, or worse, The Price Is Right.
Sick days, and I mean real sick days which were the only kind I’ve ever
taken, often lost their allure after two or three hours of reruns of bad 70’s
shows, which seemed like Citizen Kane compared to the afternoon soap operas soon
to follow. (I recall one of the cool
things about college was having time off during the day one could use any way
he saw fit, which just as often found me hitting the great pool hall on campus
or listening to cool shit on a friend’s stereo in his downtown apartment. I’d love to have a lifestyle again with that
sort of informal breathing room, but it hasn’t happened!)
But I’m sure the main draw of the day would have been
gathering the tribe for a long lunch at the Ponderosa Steakhouse at the mall,
followed by shooting pool at Holiday Lanes.
This meant rock and roll, too. Listening to it on a car stereo, driving from
place to place. If it was my friend G
driving, that would have meant Zappa, T. Rex, Joan Jett, The J. Geils Band, Billy Squier, and a host of other 70’s and early 80’s rock acts. If T was driving, one thing and one thing only:
Van Halen. However many albums they had
by that time in the 80’s. David Lee
Roth, only. Sammy Hagar was a solo act
at that point (and G had a few of his albums on cassette). I grew to hate Van Halen at the time (but
changed my mind later when not being force-fed their music multiple times a
week).
Just because Ponderosa was a steakhouse didn’t mean we
had steak. In fact, I don’t think I ever
had a steak at that Ponderosa. They had
an open salad bar for some outrageously low price (less than $5.00 if I
remember correctly). And while you think
we would have eaten an endless supply of lettuce and tomatoes, it was more like
all that other hideously wrong shit you’ll find at cheap steakhouse salad bars:
really bad soup, potato salad, mac and cheese that was somehow worse than the
instant shit we made at home, and I can’t recall much else.
Actually, I did eat a lot of vegetables, probably two
or three plates worth. The absolute
worst though was the soft-serve ice cream.
We would see people getting large dinner plates piled four inches high
with soft-serve ice cream. Of course,
judging by the size of most of them, they were on a diet, and this was some
sort of concession. We ate like horses
and had free soda refills. Back then we were kids and seemed oblivious of the fact that a glass of
non-diet soda was over 200 calories, and we’d have five or six. In theory, salad bars should be healthy, but
steakhouse salad bars were more like the cheap end of a very unhealthy trough,
for pigs like us on a budget. We thought
actually ordering a steak along with an unending salad bar was ostentatious
over-abundance. This is what Rome must
have been like before it fell! (Rome,
Georgia, maybe.)
Sometimes we’d end up puking in the parking lot, JB in
particular who seemed to have an aversion to any non-meat related food. Those Ponderosa lunches were essentially drinking
sessions without the alcohol: those freewheeling, hours going
back and forth types of myth-making bullshit sessions were the same kind of things we’d do a few
years later in bars, with the added allure of beer and women. We already had it all in some sense, that
underlying sense of camaraderie which is what most guys really want from a good
night out at the bar (despite telling themselves they’re trying to get laid). And the older I get, the more I miss those
sort of informal male-bonding sessions as it grows so much harder to get adults
on the same page to enjoy each other’s company.
From the Ponderosa, it was a short ride to Holiday
Lanes just outside of Shenandoah. It
became a pierogie factory after that, then a storage space, then I don’t know
what. Last I saw, they were trying to
launch a farmer’s market there. It’s
hard to believe I spent so many teenage nights in that space, working on my
pool skills. While the bowling lanes
took up most of the space, I don’t think I’ve ever bowled more than a handful
of times in my life. Off to the right
side of the entrance was the pool hall, where you’d pick up a rack of balls
from the counterman and work up a few hours at an open table.
I can see why we never got laid in high school when
the most fun we were having was in exclusively male-bonding scenarios, like
the Ponderosa and pool shooting. Aside
from G, who had a table in his parent’s basement, we were all pretty average
players, despite getting off the occasional Minnesota Fats, table length,
multi-bumper shot that always felt like a gift from God. Such a shot would usually come with a game on
the line, a desperation hail-mary of a pool shot that found us aiming in the
general direction and praying the crappy side bumpers actually responded
according to our on-the-fly geometrical projections. Such a winning shot would generally be
followed by our opponent ass-hammering us in the next game, and so on, all
night long, until we got tired of taking up space and hit the road.
As usual, rock and roll was blasting the whole time,
adding to the cool factor, I recall many air-guitar solos fingered on pool
cues, pretending I was Neil Young when "Powderfinger" came blasting over WZZO on the radio. There were no jocks, or stoners,
or kids who got A’s, or kid’s who got D’s, in the pool hall, just guys shooting
pool, from the ages of about 14 through 30.
Pool is one of those things that just fell away for me after
college. I recall going to a few
radically over-priced halls in Manhattan when I first moved here, but it just
didn’t take hold and no longer had that same allure of a gritty place like
Holiday Lanes.
How many hundreds or thousands of hours did we waste
there? Of course, none of it was a
waste. That time we spent as kids, who
had just learned how to drive as teenagers and reveled in those new senses of
freedom and identity, it’s the kind of time I no longer have a sense of after
decades of adulthood. Everything I do now in
a similar sense of spending leisure time has a purpose of some sort. Whether that means working on my physical and
mental health in a gym, having dinner with a friend, or going out for drinks
with coworkers and such, everything feels weighted with purpose, even if it’s
the same purpose (bonding) as we had back then.
I felt directionless back then doing stuff like the Ponderosa/Holiday
Lanes circuit, in a good way. Time
suspended, all the time in the world to hang loose, let’s just hang out and
enjoy each other’s company.
That’s what we would have done, set free a glorious, sunny
school day in late January. I can see
the physical impossibilities with ever having that same sense of freedom
again. Everyone I knew back then was in
the same school, so we all had the day off.
We all had nothing to do. We all
did the same things in our spare time.
So it only made sense that we’d band together and take advantage of a
free shot like that.
Flash forward a few decades. Everyone I know is spread out among various
jobs, living in various states (and even countries), living in various
circumstances (married, with kids, divorced, working 14 hour days, etc.). Some of us aren’t even on the same page, warring over various issues that sprung up over the years,
falling in and out of touch, whatever time brings, I can see it brings strange
sometimes troubling shit no one saw coming.
I’m finding, even with an old friend, that when she gets on Facebook and
tries to gather troops for a night out when I’m back there visiting (really,
just an excuse for anyone to hang out for a few hours in a nice bar/restaurant
to have a few drinks), people either play dead or act like it’s pulling teeth
to make time to spend 2-3 hours of their lives doing this.
Once upon a time, we’d do that with no warning, on a
moment’s notice with a phone call, and everyone saying why the hell not, got
nothing better to do. I would love my
life to be that way again, and if there’s any sort of resolution I’d make, for
a new year or otherwise, it’s to allow that sort of freedom into my life again,
instead of acting like I’m too important or busy to have that sort of important
fun. I like to think kids are idiots,
but so long as they understand this, they’ll always have something over adults. And I don't know why we're so stupid.
