Mostly, We Made Poor Decisions
Every group of friends has one house.
Not necessarily the biggest house. Or the nicest. Just the one where everybody eventually ended up.
For us, it belonged to one of my best friends from high school. I’ll leave him unnamed because he’s grown into a respectable citizen, and I see no reason to drag him back into evidence after all these years.
Most of us were football teammates, which meant we already spent all week together. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Once practice was over, we’d pile into somebody’s car and go looking for something to do.
That was our first mistake.
People today ask what teenagers did before cell phones.
Mostly, we made poor decisions.
Some of them were harmless. Some of them were hilarious. A few of them still make me shake my head and wonder how any of us survived to adulthood.
It really is a miracle.
We drank far more than we should have and certainly more than the law would have approved of. Looking back, what amazes me isn’t that we drank underage.
It’s that we sometimes did it while driving around back roads with absolutely nowhere to go.
We weren’t driving to a destination.
The driving was the destination.
If we happened to stumble onto a bonfire, another group of friends, or somebody willing to buy us a hamburger at Burger King, well, that was just icing on the cake.
Somehow we survived ourselves.
The first time I ever got drunk came courtesy of Old Grand-Dad and Co-Cola.
One minute I was wondering why anybody would spoil a perfectly good Coke.
The next minute, I was convinced I was the funniest human being who had ever walked the earth.
Fortunately, I was a happy drunk.
One of my friend’s younger brothers wasn’t.
He became mean enough that an evening could turn on a dime. More than once, a perfectly good party dissolved into a fistfight. On one memorable occasion, somebody decided a shotgun belonged in the discussion.
If you’ve ever heard someone calmly say, “Y’all put that shotgun up,” you can safely assume the evening has wandered off course.
That same house was where we decided we’d become moonshiners.
Now, understand something.
None of us knew the first thing about making moonshine.
That minor detail didn’t slow us down.
We mixed up a batch of mash in an old washtub beneath the crawl space, burned more of it than we ever produced, and somehow remained convinced we were carrying on an honored Southern tradition instead of committing crimes against chemistry.
But my favorite memory from that house happened on Thursday afternoons.
Someone discovered an old pair of childhood boxing gloves. Tiny little things. We could barely wedge our hands into them, which should have been our first clue this wasn’t going to end well.
Instead, we decided to hold what became known as Thursday Night Fights.
Thursday practices before Friday night’s football game were always short and light. We’d finish practice, head to our friend’s house, lace up those little gloves, and proceed to beat each other silly.
We bloodied noses.
We split lips.
We collected black eyes like merit badges.
Then we’d head over to the freshman football game because our head coach required every varsity player to be there.
The first week, Coach looked puzzled.
The second week, he looked suspicious.
By the third week, after surveying a collection of bloody shirts, swollen faces and fresh cuts, he had apparently concluded that whatever we were doing on Thursday afternoons was not contributing to Friday night victories.
His speech before practice was brief.
“Gentlemen, the Thursday Night Fights are over.”
There was no discussion.
No appeals process.
The commissioner had ruled.
New Year’s Eve at that house followed one simple rule.
His mother collected everybody’s truck keys.
That was it.
She knew full well what a house full of seventeen-year-old boys was going to be doing on New Year’s Eve. She wasn’t trying to stop us from acting like fools.
She was just making sure we didn’t act like fools behind the wheel.
Looking back, she probably saved more than one life by dropping a handful of car keys into a kitchen drawer before she went to bed.
And then there was the Yellow River.
We had a secret spot along a granite outcropping that only one of us knew how to find after dark. We’d mix up a concoction of what we proudly called Hunch Punch — a terrifying combination of red Kool-Aid and Golden Grain — and spend the evening telling lies, solving the world’s problems, and laughing at jokes that probably weren’t very funny.
The only rule was that we had to leave before our navigator got too drunk to remember the way back to civilization.
That sentence made perfect sense when we were seventeen.
Today it sounds like something Charles Darwin would have written as a warning.
I haven’t seen most of those boys in years.
Life has a way of scattering friends in different directions. Careers happen. Families happen. Time happens.
I’ve changed.
I quit drinking a long time ago. These days I’m more likely to be in bed before the local news than riding dirt roads after midnight looking for trouble. I’d probably be the first one reminding everybody to drive carefully on the way home.
That alone might get me voted out of the club.
Still, every now and then, my mind wanders back to that old house.
Not because I miss the whiskey.
Or the moonshine.
Or the Thursday Night Fights.
Lord knows I don’t miss waking up wondering what foolish thing I’d done the night before.
What I miss is the certainty that everybody would eventually end up at that house. Together.
For a few years, it was our headquarters. Our clubhouse. The place where stories began.
The house has probably changed by now.
But in my mind, it still looks exactly the same.
There’s a bunch of football players in the yard. Somebody’s laughing from the kitchen. A pair of little boxing gloves is lying in the corner. And somewhere, a mama is quietly collecting truck keys from a bunch of boys who were absolutely convinced they were grown men.
It’s funny.
We thought we owned the world.
Turns out, we were just borrowing a little piece of it until it was time to grow up.