I’m thirteen years old, and it seems like only yesterday. I’ve decided to spend the morning and afternoon with Andrew, my best friend; and we’re already eating pancakes by the plate full. It’s no secret that life has finally hurled us into adolescence, that wonderfully awkward period during which our voices will mutate so much that we’ll sound like drowning donkeys, and we’ll boast that our intellects are so abundantly astute that we deserve doctorates. We’ll ogle girls and consume excessive quantities of junk food. We’ll adopt a small collection of four-letter words to our vocabularies, and generally make asses out of ourselves as conspicuously and as often as humanly possible.
We have only begun our rebellion against our respective childhoods, but we’re already gaining much-needed ground. Our knowledge of popular music at this time is juvenile at best, but we like to pretend that we’re enthusiasts. We listen - not to what we like - but to what we’re supposed to like, and to what certain individuals with delusions of control would prefer that we don’t listen to. The radio is on, and we’re poolside, blasting hard rock tunes like they’re all the ammunition we’ve got. We catapult ourselves up and into the still water like bombs - gotta disrupt that status quo - and the war is on. The war for the future. Our future.
Suddenly, the radio stabs us in the back with Faith No More’s “Falling to Pieces,” and Andrew is out of the pool.
“Fuck this crap,” he yells.
He turns the radio down, and calls the DJ at the radio station. After a few moments of holding the call, the DJ finally opens Andrew’s line. Before he can get his “hip” DJ greeting out, my companion is on him.
“My radio is playing Faith No More, and that’s a problem.”
From the still-rocking waves of the pool, I can hear the DJ’s garbled voice saying something.
“I’ll give you a request,” Andrew offers. “Don’t play Faith No More no more.”
Garble-garble goes the DJ in the phone.
“Okay, look. How about this?” And with that, my friend turns and mumbles into the cordless machine like he’s calling reinforcements from inside the depths of enemy territory. The DJ garbles back, and Andrew hangs up.
“What the hell did you tell him?” I ponder out loud.
“It’s taken care of,” says he.
A few more minutes pass, and the wretched Faith No More song trails off.
“Here it comes,” he says. And he’s right.
All at once, the stereo erupts with sound and furious glee, hurling the backyard pool patio into an orchestrated ceremony of hard guitar riffs and clashing cymbals. It’s our mighty musical counter-attack, and my good friend is more than proud of his achievement. It’s “Breaking the Law,” by Judas Priest.
Now, if we were really bad-ass, we’d go breaking as many laws as we can right now. But we remain there in the backyard, our headquarters, bouncing like fools and flinging invisible locks of hair every which way. We flip and twirl and dive, and we blast into the water as hard as our skinny, white bodies will allow. We cry out and curse like we’re God’s unwanted children, needing no one because no one needs us. We’re the beating heart of our generation, and nothing can stop us.
And then Andrew saves my life.
Grossly miscalculating my ability to perform a mid-air double somersault into the swimming pool, I quite literally almost kill myself. The thing is, I never even reach mid-air status. I step onto the diving board quickly, not realizing that it has become too slippery to manage at high speeds. My legs give out, and I fall hard on the board, tumbling off and into the deep end. I try to surface, but having landed almost exclusively on my left arm, I can’t maneuver it. And because the impact has knocked all the wind from my lungs, I sink like a cinder block.
My eyes are wide open and burning from the chlorine, and I’m flailing with my one good arm. My mouth gurgles as I try to scream, and I’m terrified. Everything is rushing noise - violent, non-stop. An invisible fight that seems to go on forever with an enemy I can’t take hold of. My ears feel like they’re about to explode. I’m going to die.
Suddenly, a pair of arms. Kicking feet. Grabbing me, pulling me up and away from my demise. Just like that.
Andrew tows me to the pool’s edge. I spend the next few minutes there, catching my breath, shivering off my anxiety, and coughing up all varieties of bodily discharge.
“That looked like it sucked,” he says to me.
“Yeah,” I answer, trying to sound a little less shaken up. “It did.”
We sit quietly, dangling our feet into the water and watching the little waves ripple outward and dissipate. We don’t speak, because even young men such as ourselves know that when something like this happens, it’s almost immediately stricken from the record. This never happened. I try not to look at the June bugs flailing helplessly on the water’s surface. Finally, I turn to my friend.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No worries.”
***
I’m twenty-two years old, and it’s last Tuesday. I’m cruising with an acquaintance, and we’re talking about the old days like they were Hell and Heaven all at once. We laugh and carry on like survivors, and my companion asks, “Hey, remember Andrew? Andrew Sanders?”
“Yes,” I say.
My companion laughs. “Remember when he used to chug milk and belch the alphabet?”
“Yes,” I say.
My companion smiles, and sighs a little contently.
“You know,” he begins, half-thinking to himself, “it’s been two or three years since I saw that guy.”
My eyes roll up to my brain, and I do the math.
“Nine years," I respond. "It's been nine years for me."
“Seems like only yesterday.”
END
