The year 2007 became the year 2008. As the number of days
before my boot camp ship day counted down, I was settling into a solid routine:
school, work, Delayed Entry Program meetings on the first Saturday of every
month, and filling in the time between in Christmas Tree as much as possible. I
hoped that the car would be my ticket to independence and maturity. While it
was clear that, especially since the LN3 swap made it orders of magnitude
better, it was fulfilling the first purpose superbly, its effect on the second
purpose was a little more abstract than I expected.
Before the Buick, my entire life revolved around video
games, mostly Halo 2 and Burnout 3, and my group of friends who
played them. Nearly every weekend of my freshman and sophomore years of high
school were spent with Halo 2 LAN
parties, but then I got a job to prepare myself for car ownership and the
weekends duking it out on Coagulation and Foundation, eating cheap pizza and
off-brand soda were becoming a thing of the past. The Buick was my ticket to
independence and a dream I had (even if I wasn’t always aware of it) since I knew
what a car was, but to my friends it seemed like mostly a ticket to (mostly)
free rides and a cavernous trunk to hide illicit (for our age) substances. Of
course, I had never been above the partying, having participated in many a
party with them when I was 16 and 17, but I found myself saying no, and also
being glad to have my job to fall back on, more and more as the parties became
less let’s-see-if-we’re-still-good-at-Halo-drunk and more like proto-frat-boy
ritualization. I was growing up, but I was beginning to wonder if my friends
were not.
After one of the parties at my friend’s house became raucous
enough to be busted by the police (I had been at work), I decided to take a
break from that group and began exploring the friendship of some of my coworkers.
By this time I had been promoted from cashier to grocery clerk, which I enjoyed
significantly more than cashiering. My managers enjoyed me as a clerk much more
than they did as a cashier as well, and I was firmly in the camp of Valuable
Employee. My fellow clerks were mostly rednecks, both of the moneyed part of
West Monroe and the semi-white-trash parts out in unincorporated Ouachita
Parish, generally decent young people (we weren’t old enough to start talking
about sociopolitical issues). I didn’t fit in at all but we all enjoyed my
square-peg-in-a-round-home attempts at being cool, and they especially
appreciated that I could take any
amount of ribbing and dish it out just as hard. Once I started getting invited
to their parties, I found they were just as raucous, but enjoyably so (for
17-18 year old me, anyway, maybe I hadn’t quite grown up yet after all), and
since at least someone there had some sort of direct connection to the local
law enforcement, there were no uncomfortable encounters.
It was also around this time that I met my future girlfriend,
Kirstie. She started as a cashier at the store I worked at several months after
I moved to the grocery department. Her first reaction to meeting me was
something along the lines of “holy shit,
your eyes”. I have one blue eye and one brown eye, which I learned was an
extremely attractive trait in the furry community (the appreciation of
anthropomorphism, to give a simple definition), in which she was a budding
artist. While she didn’t understand my hard-wired obsession for cars, it was
very nice to have some else very close who was weird. From then on we were inseparable, or writing now with
hindsight, she was inseparable with me. She had developed for herself the
“fursona” of a fox, and fashioned me one of an odd-eyed raccoon, both vagabonds
who fit in just enough to function and get what we needed but who would never
truly be a part of anything. There was a bit of a learning curve, and even
though there was (and still is) a bit of a stigma on minors, I fully immersed
myself into it all.
With at least my immediate future
guaranteed through the military, I hadn’t put as much effort into my studies as
I had the Buick, work, or my pursuit of furriness with Kirstie. My last
semester of high school I needed to take 7:00 AM classes to have enough credits
to graduate, which I did in May 2008, 400-something-th out of the 450 or so
students in my class, the first (and, as it would turn out, only) one of my mother’s three children
to do so. Only a handful of the people who became my first friends in high
school did. I had suddenly become aware of the passage of time. I was a Real
Adult now, without even realizing it, and whether I liked it or not.
Wanting to spend as much time as
possible together before the Navy took ownership of me, Kirstie wrung her
parents for two tickets to Anthrocon 2008, all the way up in Pittsburgh.
Neither of us had ever been that far north, and I was excited to test the Buick’s
mettle as a real long-distance road
cruiser, having only wet its feet a little bit on long roadgeeking excursions. I
planned a route with the latest copy of the Rand
McNally Road Atlas (the other thing I read religiously and memorized
cover-to-cover apart from car brochures), and we hit the road. The trip started
off less than encouraging, at interstate speeds there was a hand-numbing
vibration through the wheel, bad enough to prompt me to find a shop just a few
miles across the Mississippi border. They found that my wheels, the ancient
Pontiac 6000 alloys that had been on there when I bought it, had shed their
weights. It was a quick and easy fix, one that the shop even did for free, and
the ride was significantly better after that. The Christmas tree’d-out
dashboard made me a bit wary, keeping in mind the cause of the engine swap that
inadvertently caused the Christmas tree-ing, because I had no way of knowing
whether or not I was running hot or low on oil. I took to checking the oil and
coolant every time we stopped. Kirstie was not a confident driver, and even
less so in my big, ponderous, quirky old hooptie, so I ended up pulling the
lion’s share of the 1100-mile drive. If we ran hot, the Buick never showed it,
and it was even averaging close to 25 mpg by the time we arrived in Pittsburgh.
The convention was generally
enjoyable. I really dug the brightly-colored fursuits, welcoming and cuddly-looking,
although I only admired from afar as I was too worried I would accidentally
offend or somehow damage someone’s expensive work (those suits cost about three
or four times what I paid for my Buick). I also had the feeling that, being a
non-fursuiter at a furry convention, I was missing a significant part of the
point, and the fact that we were under 21 (in the city with the most bars per
capita in the U.S.) and on a shoestring budget limited our appeal as hangout
buddies after-hours. Still, I had as much fun as I felt I reasonably could
have, and Kirstie was especially happy that I came with her. As far as a final
trip in my last days as a civilian, I couldn’t have asked for much better.
When it was all over, we pointed
the Buick back south, my convention badge hanging from the rearview mirror,
where it would stay for a couple years. The drive home was largely uneventful.
I spent much of it reflecting on the past, the future, and all that
philosophical nonsense of a teenage mind racing as it realizes its halcyon days
are just about over. I wanted the road to continue into infinity, just the two
of us and the Buick. Of course, that didn’t happen, and we returned to West Monroe.
My last couple weeks as a civilian
were a blur. I don’t remember a whole lot aside from leaving my grocery-store
job, the going-away party my friends from there threw me (of which I don’t
remember much after the Everclear showed up), and trying to spend as much time
as possible with Kirstie and the Buick before the day I had to be at the
recruiting office at 7:00 AM sharp for my six-year date with the Navy.
No comments:
Post a Comment