It was the biggest thing happening my junior year of high school; a party at Marina Langston's house about two weeks before the school year ended. I had flirted with her quite a bit that year, so I was not surprised the day that her best friend Chancel approached me at my locker and invited me to come. Closing my locker door (two hide the magnificent picture of Anna Kornakova lunging for a tennis ball) I quickly accepted. Indeed my locker in high school never did contain anything valuable to my schooling; rather, it contained a pair of boxing gloves (which I would use on my two cronies, Gordo, and Chappy), the picture of tennis goddess Anna Kornakova, and the random, hardly edible concoctions that I would intermittently make to dare my friends to eat or drink at our lunch table.
The worst of these concoctions was one comprised of water from my dog's bowl, six month old previously opened cranberry concentrate, and lintel stew which my friend Gordo drank for five dollars and a challenge to his manhood. Now to visualize this, one must have a clear image of what Gordo looked like. He was a rotund fellow, with a curly red afro and freckles all over his face. His stomach protruded out at least four inches past his pectorals and as he chugged the magical mixture I had created for him it convulsed in noticeable rhythmic beats which the entire table found funny enough to laugh about. With each sip and he made loud gulping sounds attracting the attention of all the tables around us. Upon lowering the empty bottle, his face was red but triumphant at having proven his hardness to the rest of the table. His face turned frighteningly white upon hearing what the mixture had contained, and he suddenly threw up all over our round lunch table.
Chappy was a different character entirely. His upper body was thick but muscless, and was carried by disproportionately thin legs. His feet jetted outward like those of a duck and he when he walked he took up twice his own width with his large strides. Chappy’s structural irregularities ironically played to his advantage on the dance floor. At high school dances his large body could be seen jettisoning above the crowd, limberly carried by his thin legs which would create oddly “hip” angles for those who watched him. People who tried to get dancing lessons from him often left disheartened by the fact that they couldn’t quite create the same movements. His ability on the dance floor, and the fact that he had a car, and I did not, make Chappy an invaluable wingman during my high school years.
Upon inviting me to the party, it was understood that Gordo and Chappy were also invited. Chappy picked me up at my house and we headed over to Pumpkin Lane, in Phillips, Maine. When we arrived it was dark and the field adjacent to Marina’s house was filled with cars and people. Chappy parked the car in the back of the field and we got out of the car and headed over to the giant bon fire. Marina and Chancel ran over and hugged us and we talked for a while (until I noticed that Marina had a boyfriend) and we met up with Gordo at the edge of the field. All in all the there were about 100 people at this party and I couldn’t help but wonder at how kind Marina’s parents were to allow them to destroy their field by making “doughnuts” with their cars, and throwing beer cans all over. The party was lively, music blared from the house across road, and people danced in headlights, and the flickering flames. Soon couples were making their ways to the backseats of their cars, and drunks were falling asleep in random places on the field.
As I stood with Gordo and Chappy and a few other friends from school I suddenly noticed the flashing lights of doom approaching the field from down the road. Blue and red cut through the air as the patrol cars sent out sudden “whoops” from their sirens. As the large spotlights began to scour the field, bewildered high school students began to stampede in every direction. Not wanted to be the only one left to hold accountable I rushed to the nearest woods line and ducked down inside a bush. The lights swung back and forth through the woods as the officers hounded orders from their speakerphones. To my astonishment I suddenly realized that I was lying beside our very drunk, future class valedictorian, Luke. He didn’t look impressed with his situation and began to concernedly tell me of how this could ruin his whole life.
Upon hearing this tragic tale, I begin to think of how evading arrest could ruin mine and stood up once the light had passed my bush and made my way to a part of the field were it would appear that I had been there the whole time. I found Chappy there; he hadn’t moved from the time the police had arrived (apparently his mother had put the fear of God into him about running from police). As the police rounded up the many drunks that were foolish enough to stop within 20 feet of the woods line Chappy’s reasoning that we couldn’t be in trouble for anything, as he and I had not had anything to drink began to make sense to me. Upon checking our breaths for alcohol, the officers apparently decided that Chappy and I were valuable assets when it came to having to move all of the drunkard’s cars off of the field and they quickly began calling us by name in friendly tones. I noticed Marina standing in the center of the field speaking to two officers. She was crying and her boyfriend was hugging her. I overheard her tell the officer that the field was not actually her parents, but that they were merely thinking about buying it (lets hope they did after that). Soon the parents began to arrive, including Marina’s mother who seemed less than impressed with the situation, and even less impressed with Chappy and I for having been present, as she knew us well. We helped move all of the cars off of the field and parked them tightly in Marina’s driveway, and Chappy and I headed back to his house for the night, glad to have escaped this affair without it ever coming to the attention of our parents.
The next day at school the tales of individual responses to the bust began to appear. Apparently a large group of students had escaped by making their way approximately three miles through the woods to Josh Plov’s house and spent the night. Gordo was among them, and somehow picturing his large personage huffing through the dark forests, wondering whether dogs were after him brought a chuckle to my mind. Luke had stayed in the woods with the intention of coming out when the police left, only to awaken at about four in the morning in the very bush I had found him in. Most of the students ended up going home with parents. All in all about 13 had been arrested for underage drinking and rumors were rampant that some big investigation must be underway to determine the names of those who had hid. I assume that this was not the case as nothing else ever came of this. Later that year I would date Marina, and go to many more (smaller) parties at her house but THE famous high school party on Pumpkin Lane would always be the most memorable.
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3 comments:
Comedy is hard, and I'm taking this as comedy--hard because if the reader isn't along for the ride, the writer is naked out there, up on a tightrope without a safety net, to offer three choice metaphors. If we feel the comedy, fine; if we don't, what is there?
I'm not asking for a rewrite because I'm unable to offer anything more helpful as a guide to you than to say that for me, the tone is off here, the writer has moved on but the story is still frozen in its earliest incarnation.
Do any of these comments make sense, connect to your own perhaps-stray or half-suppressed thoughts on the piece?
Well I guess my overall intent in writing this piece was less comedy and more a simple narrative about a certain event. I didn't really have any intention of making it amusing. After re-reading it I can see that there appears to have been some semblance of comedy there but that being the case, most of it was lost on the fact that I was trying to simply set a scene and than expand upon it by telling the story of how I remember the first party I ever attended.
I was mainly attempting to recollect my memories of an event that occurred a long time ago. I thought that I accomplished that; though I acknowledge that the story line may have been a bit bland. I think my hope was that this story would bring to mind parties that the readers have been to that were busted. I guess in that regard, picturing the police hunting for stumbling drunks could be a rather universal memory for many.
It was all in all a very honest piece and painted a fairly clear picture of the high school party bust exactly as I remembered it (from my exact point of view at that age).
I don't think first person narrative is my forte, exactly for the reasons that your qoute blow stated; I feel far more comfortable avoiding identifying myself in a work.
Good!--always pleased to hear a student's reasonable defense of a piece; I'd hate it if you couldn't lay out your response openly.
I guess for me the comedy was set early in the description of the locker and the challenge eating and continued in the slightly ornate style.
I thought week 4 was a corker of a first-person piece, so don't overgeneralize based on a small sample. What you prefer and what you can do well at are not necessarily the same.
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