My Youth (Circa 1986) Is Calling Me

It’s a quiet Saturday night and I want to get out.  The problem is all my friends are my age, which means too old to call up and say, “Let’s go out and find some excitement.”

Not only that, but I don’t think I have the energy to spend more than an hour anywhere tonight.  I don’t want to go out, but I don’t want to stay in.  So I just sit here feeling old.  I’ve been listening to music from the 80s on YouTube.  My youth is taunting me from the far side of a canyon 20+ years wide.  That little smartass.  I want him to shut up.  

Sometimes his bragging and boasting are pretty broad in scope.  Other times, he’s very specific about his exact location, mocking me with memories of it.  Tonight he’s shouting at me from 1986—a time when I felt especially bold and ready for a new adventure every day.  By early July, I’d been out of college a couple of months and in Tampa only a month.  That young version of me had no real plan, no idea what his next move would be.  But a fresh sheepskin and a wallet full of shiny credit cards keep that from bothering him.  These are his talismans, his shields from worry proof that he was a full-fledged adult.  He didn’t have these things only a few months earlier.  This was the time he dreamed of for four years.  Now he would savor it and take his place in the post-collegiate world..

Never mind that he doesn’t have much money and the humidity in Tampa is almost a hundred percent.  He’ll go out because it’s Saturday night and he’ll have so much fun it won’t matter that his clothes cling to him like they're afraid he'll go off and forget them at the nightclub or wherever else his whim might lead him.

If it’s July, 1986 he still loves the latest hit by Journey called Girl Can’t Help It.  It won’t end up being one of their biggest hits, but it will end up being his favorite song by them.  Maybe it was the steady, strong drum beat, like his steady, strong young heartbeat.  

He'd be deciding what to put on with his stereo turned up loud (to hell with the neighbors upstairs) playing his favorite Top 40 station, called Q Zoo.  Ironically, he's sliding into a pair of button fly Levi's 501s with a 28 inch waist and a madras shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  He surveys himself in a mirror and is quite please, thanks to his newfound habit of working out at a gym.  His confidence has seen a huge uptick.  This while We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off is on.  It seems this song is always on when he's getting dressed to go out or in the car headed out to prowl.

This song, World Destruction, might fill the dance floor.  He loves it and is pretty sure it isn't being played back in Arkansas.

He sees the movie Ruthless People and likes it as much as this Luther Vandross song from the soundtrack.

Maybe 1986 stands out so much because my body enderwent a bit of a makeover.  I found out i actually liked lifting weights and, even more surprising, it was working.  I heard this song, The Other Side of Life, alot at the gym.  It reminded me of what I was doing in Tampa.

By October, he's made several friends, almost all of them transplants from other states, just like himself.  There's a big street party in Ybor City at Halloween.  It's warm and people wear costumes leaving little to the imagination.  He spots several other young people, all with perfect bodies, dressed up (or maybe I should say down) as Baby New Year.  Twenty-two year old me has on old army pants, a green T-shirt, combat boots and a black bandana.  Rambo.  Word Up comes on and he climbs up on a 4-foot wall to watch the crowd dance in the intersection.  He sheds his inhibitions, along with his T-shirt, and carefully dances on the wall.  He feels free, alive, and fearless. 

Surviving Youth

Today it’s been 10 years since my friend Joe was killed in a motorcycle accident.  It’s so hard to believe it’s been an entire decade.  In that time, 9/11, two wars, a severe recession, a devastating oil spill, and a bunch of other things—good, bad, and mediocre—have occurred.  I guess if there was a decade to miss out on, that would have been the one to pick.

But, of course, he didn’t get to pick.  No one does.  He was the image of health and had only been married less than a year.  He’d turned 30 a month before.  He had every reason to stick around.  A collision with a pickup truck on a rural highway killed him instantly.  I still remember that punched-in-the-gut feeling I had when I found out.  Of all the people I knew, Joe was the last one I would have predicted death at an early age.

He had a positive attitude.  We would work out together and at the start would say, “Tell me something good.”  Sometimes I had to think for a minute, but Joe could always name half a dozen right off the top of his head.  I learned a lot from him—about the right kind of attitude as well as how to lift weights to my best advantage.  A positive influence like that leaves a huge hole in your soul when it’s suddenly taken away.

In last ten years, I’ve had a kidney transplant and cancer.  There have been a few other non-life-threatening health issues mixed in with all that as well, including emergency surgery to save a badly-damaged eye.  But I’m still here.  The randomness of survival boggles my mind, even at my age.  I guess it always will.

A few years before Joe died, a buddy from high school was murdered at a fast food restaurant where he was a manager, closing up at the end of the day.  Someone cut his throat so deep it nearly severed his head.  But he survived a few more days and required dozens of units of blood. 

My first experience with death of a friend near my age was in 1985.  My friend, Terrance, was killed in a car accident.  He was riding with one of his fraternity brothers after a party.  They were drunk.  It was his 24^th birthday.  And it happened only two weeks after my grandfather died, so for me, it was an extra layer of death.  But, my grandfather was 70 and had fought cancer for six months.  It was expected.  Someone told me Terrance had been killed over the weekend while some of us stood in the hall at the U of A before class started.  I just walked away and wandered around campus for a while, not able to think.

It’s hard to imagine Terrance at nearly 50 years old.  I’ve known others who died at a younger age than I am now.  They’re in suspended animation.  One will always be 36, another 39. 

Yet here I am, in spite of the odds.  I’ve been told more than once, “You’ve already dealt with more than most people do in a lifetime.”  I think they mean an average lifetime lasting 75 years or so.

What is it that causes males to check out early?  At conception, more than half of all fetuses are male.  From then on, males die at a higher rate than females.  Maybe testosterone makes us crave danger and leads us into all kinds of risky behaviors.  Being male means dodging bullets—literally and metaphorically—while watching our buddies run out of luck.

My luck has held out longer than I thought it would.  I wish I could have shared that luck with all of my friends.  Here I sit, in middle age with surgery scars I wear like medals of battles won.  Those friends I mentioned will always be young in my mind, because youth wasn’t something they survived. 

Funny thing about youth is we rush through it, sometimes so recklessly some of us don’t survive it.  Then it wears off and we’re wiser and more cautious.  We wish for the chance to be young again, knowing that if we experienced it a second time, we might not live to see the end of it.