Grackles...

 

A FB friend of mine mentioned her affinity for the color purple when she was in High school, mainly due to the purple uniforms the cheerleaders and footballers wore.

Give me a “V”, give me an “I”, give me, give me…Victory!

For me, High School, and the color purple, conjure up very different images. In my mind’s eye, I still see the splashes of purple puke running down the sides and rear windows of Mrs. Callahan's tan station wagon.

Our crew had been retching purple slime out of David Callahan's mother's station wagon, doing 95 MPH as we shot through the open toll booth between Staten Island and New Jersey sometime past 1:30 in the morning. A sick green wash added another dimension as the fluorescent lighting of the toll booth came and went in a blur.

Earlier, we had driven 45 minutes to a horrible little bar that Westfield peeps frequented back in the daze, and parked in a dark, fetid alley behind it. The whole place was alien territory for us, something right out of a black & white low budget detective flick. Exciting, dangerous, and unpredictable.

I remember seeing a used condom lying broken and bloody on the sidewalk, wondering if the girl involved had been used and discarded in the same way.

This place wasn't the pristine, neatly trimmed “colonial” Westfield I was used to. The very definition of creepy, and don’t touch anything nasty, but the bar knew that most of us were underage, and didn’t care.

We would present our fake ID's at the door, standing up straight, doing our best “of course I’m 18, you must be crazy to even ask me for my ID” pose. I looked 14, blond and pink cheeked, but since I had the bad ID, it was no problem. I have no remaining memory of why we drank slow Gin Fizzes, having never had one before or since. Nasty purple puke color drinks, even before you blow them out of your nose onto the sides of Mrs. Callahan’s tan station wagon. Like a gaggle of berry stuffed Grackles, we stained all surfaces within shooting distance on the frantic run back home, including my perception of those kinds of desperate, youthful attempts to find something, some kind of an elusive prize, that I mistakenly thought was adulthood.

Over and over, I found that adulthood was in the opposite direction, and way more than just the one step ahead we imagined.

It was still a very sobering, long way off.