Trip to Portsville

We had a car so we left. Telephone poles whipped beside us; the yellow line of liberty flew out in front of us. I was driving, Rich was sitting shotgun, and Gwen, Nick and Earl were squished, knees together, in the back. The two boys had sandwiched the girl between them, and at every hint of a turn I heard squeals of exasperation and delight as either Nick or Earl threw himself against her in a muscular and hormonal demonstration of centrifugal force. The stereo spewed angry punk songs, in case we couldn’t be young and on summer vacation and loving it by ourselves.

The car was mine, a birthday gift from my parents, found at a police auction. It was rusty, with a cracked windshield, and mysterious stains on the seats. We loved complaining about it, and the bonus thrill that its mysterious noises gave us.

The decision to drive to Portsville was not born from any definite plans or expectations of what would be there. We were bored in our town, so we decided to run to the next one over and see if we could be bored there for a while. We were not even certain of where we would sleep. Nick had brought a tent in case we couldn’t find a hotel room. But no one had a sleeping bag. I had some idea of sleeping in the car.

My parents had worriedly given me permission to leave for a day or two, with plenty of phone calls back. Rich’s were out of town, Gwen’s let her do anything, Nick’s wanted to get him out of their hair, and Earl had told his that he was spending the night at Nick’s.

We came upon some highway construction. One lane was blocked off by orange cones and flags. It was about noon, and the workers must have been on their lunch break. Rich twisted around and clutched my arm so hard I almost let go of the wheel.

“Let’s go grab some of those cones.”

I glanced around for any sign of authority and, seeing none, braked, in the middle of the lane a few feet from the first of the cones.

“Go,” I said.

I pressed the button to open the trunk and stayed in the car with the engine running while Rich, Nick, and Earl leaped out of the car and each grabbed two cones. I felt the thunk as they slammed the trunk closed. Nick and Earl jumped back into the car when their work was completed. I leaned over and peered out the passenger side door to see what was taking Rich so long, and he ran up, almost poking my eye out with the handle of a big traffic direction sign. It was the kind that says “Stop” on one side and “Slow” on the other.

“It was lying in the ditch,” he giggled.

“That’s not going to fit in the car,” I said.

The handle was so long that it would have had to go out one of the windows. Rich stopped, saw that I was right, and broke the flimsy wooden handle over his knee. Then he knocked the roof of the car and shouted “Clear!” Secret Service style and sat in the car with the sign on his lap.

“I can always get a new handle.”

We drove past the construction workers a couple hundred feet on, sitting on milk crates serenely eating their lunch. They didn’t see the sign in Rich’s lap. Nick looked back out the window at them.

“I wonder what they would have done if they had seen the sign,” he asked.

“Then I might have gotten to use my baton,” Earl chirped.

“What?” Gwen’s eyebrows rose.

“Oh, I got a baton.” Seeing that this did not fully enlighten her, he added, “You know, one of those self-defense batons, like cops have.”

Nick added, solely for the benefit of the males in the car, “It’s like the one the Hell’s Angels have in the third level of ’Tough Streets.’ It’s telescopic.”

“Wow, those are pretty powerful in the game,” Rich cooed.

“Yeah, you computer geeks,” Earl sneered. He pulled the baton out of his back pocket, and at dramatic flick of his wrist a foot of steel shot out the end of a small black cylinder. It made a satisfyingly menacing sound, just as in the movies, like how I imagined the chink of chain mail sounding. Earl passed it around, allowing everybody to experiment with devising the most elegant snaps of the wrist to open and close it.

Even Gwen seemed a little impressed. But she still had to be the voice of reason and ask, “Why would you waste money on something like that?”

“Well,” he began to explain. He talked slowly, matter-of-factly, as if explaining the obvious, which to him it was. “After my little run-in with the skaters, I decided that I couldn’t always rely on a two-by-four with a nail through it being handy.”

This particular run-in was an incident with which we were all familiar. Earl had been walking alone near his house, which is near a skate park. A group of skaters walking the opposite way had recognized him and began shouting insults. Since the skate park had been built, Earl had not been friendly with the skaters that hung around his house, smoking and sulking. He had sized up the skaters as being collectively weaker than him, and began yelling better epithets back at them. Then he heard insults being yelled from behind him. Luckily, there was enough time before either of the two skater groups engulfed him for Earl to pick up a good-sized rock that was lying on the sidewalk. He walked through the skaters, the rock held high over his head, without incident. However, when the distance of a stone’s throw was between him and the skaters, the insults began again, this time with the promise to smash various parts of his anatomy.

Trees and fields began giving way to subdivisions, and we were in Portsville. Our legs were stiff; I shifted my weight back and forth to break the discomfort, but we couldn’t get out of the car. We had less of an idea of where to go here than we did in our town. At last I parked the car opposite a fast-food franchise we all agreed had appealing TV ads. We gratefully piled out and walked around the car a few times to get rid of our leg cramps, and then went into the restaurant.

Huddled in a booth over bright food trays, slurping out of soda cups half filled with ice, we began planning our next move. Nick, Earl and Rich did most of the talking. I had never mastered the art of getting a word in edgewise with those three. They usually came up with the best ideas anyway. Gwen accepted that they would railroad her suggestions as not being exciting, but that whatever they decided would probably be interesting.

Debate ranged from going to see a movie, to seeing if we would get carded at an adult bookstore, to setting trash cans on fire, to finding a game of basketball. The game of basketball was mainly a joke on Rich. He was fat and proud of it. Nick and Earl enjoyed flexing and grunting while holding barbells, and would sometimes actually settle arguments with arm wrestling. At the basketball suggestion, Rich stuck his tongue out and sneered, “Yeah, and then we can see how many push ups we can do!”

“Sounds good to me, fatty!” Earl yelled, and a woman behind him who should not have been self-conscious swiveled her head in alarm. Rich snatched Earl’s camouflaged baseball cap off Earl’s head and stuck it on his own defiantly. Nick, sitting beside Rich, defended the pride of skinny people everywhere by ripping the hat off Rich’s head, then slapping him in the face with it a few times. Gwen laughed at the display.

We continued to sit in the restaurant for a long time, happy that no one we knew would come in. Enjoying not knowing where we were going to sleep that night, or what we would be doing an hour from now.