I remember laughing so hard that I could taste here and there traces of rancid beer and the burger I ate hours ago. Brad kept pushing the Trans Am harder and harder down old Highway 2 until it seemed we were ready to take flight. Foghat’s “Drivin’ Wheel” was blasting loud; the Tranny was blasting louder. It was around three a.m. and the road was clear, lit by a three-quarter moon and not much else. Brad had the headlights out. He was drunk, but a bit more sober since he’d thrown up about thirty minutes earlier. The speedometer read something, but I couldn’t really see it and I couldn’t have really cared less. I knew we were going fast and I knew what we were doing was incredibly dangerous. I knew we were both sixteen and cool and stupid and it was something we could have certainly been killed by doing or, worse, killed someone else out that night who wasn’t drunk, angry, young, and bored by small town life. I remember laughing.
Brad was adopted when he was a baby by two incredibly loving individuals who were “cool parents” in all his friends’ eyes. They let us drink at their house, inhale herbal stimulants at will, play KISS at all hours of the day or night and pretty much were seen drunk as often as they were seen sober. They partied right along with us, but always seemed pretty sad in the end. I never really remember what they did for a living; they always seemed to be home all the time, chain-smoking and reading boring business-related magazines. They were the only parents’ of any of my friends who ever hugged me. Most parents hated me because I was a “bad influence;” Kevin’s dad actually took a swing at me one night, but that’s another story altogether.
Brad was not handsome. He had something wrong with his leg too that made him limp and his knee turn in when he walked and also had some kind of an eye condition where he consistently looked stoned, and so he had kind of a stealth advantage when he would enter class flying high looking to Mr. Ross, social-studies teacher extraordinaire, like Brad always looked while the rest of us simply looked, well, “doobied-up.” No sir, not me Mr. Ross.
Brad wore the latest clothes, “Hash” jeans, “Earth” shoes, form-fitting polyester print shirts. His home stereo put the radios the rest of us had to shame, especially when Frampton was on. He had a Fender Mustang that he couldn’t play but had customized with rock stickers. He had Cheech & Chong albums, Black Sabbath albums, Rolling Stone albums, no disco. Brad was cool.
Brad’s parents were also cool because they were rich; they bought Brad the Tranny for his sixteenth birthday, gave him a credit card for gas and “emergencies,” threw him the keys and he was off. Silver, ’76, screaming eagle decal, spoilers, fender flares, fake shaker scoop with “400 H.O.” decals, the Tranny sure beat the hell out of my Gremlin “X” when it came to being seen by the girls my pimply-face and anemic frame wanted to be seen by.
Brad just drove that car into the ground. He rarely, if ever, washed it, and more complex maintenance like checking the oil, brakes, whatever, was clearly beyond Brad’s scope of interest. If something went wrong, the credit card came out, and he was back on the road in a day or so, running the thing to redline light after light, stereo blaring, with all of us crammed into the vestigial rear seat, and usually me, his best friend, in the passenger seat. The car was filled with junk, spilled beer, vomit, bong water, and marked with all sorts of stains and scars the origin of which I wasn’t sure that I really ever wanted to know.
Brad’s girlfriend and my girlfriend were best friends and so we spent many steamy nights together in that Tranny. Jane and I would be doing whatever in the back seat while Brad and Shelley would be doing whichever in the front. Steamed windows and muffled Bob Seger out in back of the Elks’ Lodge backing up to the lake. Cars drove by only rarely, but we were never disturbed from our own night moves.
Brad drove the car over the course of that winter and it was an amazing hoot to narrowly miss nearly everything in our path as the fat radials would scratch for traction over the North Dakota snow roads while Brad kept the pedal to the floor. I kept myself in pretty good football shape that year during the off-season by regularly pushing the Tranny out from whatever snowbank Brad had shoved it into. Usually drunk or stoned, after the car was freed I would yell for Brad to hit it and then hang onto the bumper; “hitching” it was called, sliding over the ice floor while Brad careened down the road and cars whizzed by my head only inches away.
I remember laughing when Brad dropped me off that night long ago, turned the Tranny back out onto Highway Two, punched the throttle and never came back. The funeral was three days later. His parents were drunk. So was I. I had stopped laughing by then.
