WE WERE SIXTEEN AGAIN

It started out as just dinner and a show, but things got tricky fast. Somewhere off Mockingbird Lane, we took a wrong turn, ended up in a knife fight at the Frito Lays loading dock. Susan is quick with a blade, those Braceros never knew what hit them, and we were back on our way to Pharaohs Egyptian lounge, where belly dancers brought flaming kabobs to the table.

Then the exotic middle eastern music kicked in, and we huffed a little Opium from giant Hookas, before staggering across the street to see James McMurtry live in concert.

Now, I got to tell you about Susan. I known her ever since puberty, we been partners in all sorts of crime, that is to say I did everything I knew how to do in order to corrupt Susan, and her parents never liked me too much since the night she came home with all those hickeys. "That darn bullet holes" her mother had said. The fact is all we ever did was a little smooching and I never once brought her home with her shirt on inside out.

 But now, 40 years later, she was in town for Christmas and staying with her parents, and she had snuck out to go carousing with me, just like the good old days.

Anyway, we left the James McMurtry show, and we were heading home, nice and easy as you please, and I imagine she was hoping to be able to slip into the side door at home without waking mom and dad.

But there on Mockingbird Lane, we came across one of these fancy North Dallas Shopping Centers. It was lit up like you wouldn’t believe! See these trees in this picture? Well, the trees in Dallas had just about 6 million more lights in them than these.

It was like a Nuclear Holocaust, glowing bright white, and I just couldn’t stop laughing at all these lights, and it felt like I’d done a little Microdot, you could hear the lights buzz and Susan pulled her visor down to sheild her eyes there were so many and then all of a sudden I was sobered by the thought of all the poor squirrels that used to live in these trees, because I know squirrels surely did before they put up those lights ( leaving me to also wonder where all the squirrel families had moved to, and how many babies did they have, and did they lose any during the move), on account that there was no way anything alive could live in this inferno during Christmas.

So we drove out of the blaze of the shopping center, and no sooner were we on the freeway that we saw ahead what looked like a dust storm, but before either of us could say a word there appeared before us a boulder, right in the middle of our lane, and we were going 60, and we hit this big son-of-a-bitch of a rock that just came out of nowhere, and we went airborne for a moment, we could have been killed sure as the world, but Susan kept that big Lexus of hers on the road.
I’m so glad I wasn’t driving, or we’d be dead now.

“Whew” we said and looked at each other.

The car seemed to be operating OK but we decided we better pull over and see if there was anything wrong. What we had hit was a big chunk of concrete that came off the divider when a car in the oppsosite lane had hit it. It was the size of a big suitcase.
There was damage. I looked under her car to see we were hemorrhaging transmission fluid. So we had to pull in a service station, and call AAA, and they sent a wrecker and took us to the airport and Susan rented a car.

Let me tell you something about that. Over the next few months, that little night out at Dallas was going to cost AAA and State Farm Insurance somewhere around $20,000. They paid for the wrecker, the rent-car-car, the new transmission which took 3 weeks to get installed,, the plane tickets that took Susan home to another Rent-a-Car, and the plane tickets back out here to get her car a month later.
If we’d been in my car, not only would we be dead, but I’d have been shit out of luck. I don’t have AAA or collision.

So after we got that Rent-a-Car, and we back on the road at 4 o’clock in the morning, and Susan wondering if her parents would find out she had been with "that darn Bulletholes" all night, which she sure should have known better, I said:
“Since we are out, we may as well go to breakfast, doncha think? I’m hungry, and surely nothing else could go wrong, right?”

So we sat at IHOP, and ordered breakfast, and we both had worried looks on our faces, between the car and the near death experience, it just seemed so complicated.
I looked over my coffee cup.
“Susan, what are you going to tell your parents?”
And we just laughed and laughed and laughed.
Some things never change.
We were 16 again.