We had driven...

I was once told that nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: one finds the present tense, but the past perfect. Today I found myself living an adventure that seemed all too familiar.

Back in high school, my life was rather boring. I read alot, I did my homework, I spent my weekends with my girlfriend (she lived a busy life in another city, far enough away that we only saw each other when we had nothing else to do), I schemed with, played or fought with my little brother and hung out with Mike. I had other friends, but I'd known Mikey the longest. He lived down my street a ways and around the corner. We had the same friends, carpooled to the same high school, were part of the same scout troop... I'd go on but it gets rather sickening. My parents both hold him up as their favorite son - and of course he would be. For the price of a meal (he had free reign of our fridge) he'd show up and cart me off and out of their hair.

The key to all this was my truck. In high school I drove my father's 1971 Chevy C10 long bed. It was red with a white cab top, and Mike in his infinitely strange system for naming things thought it appropriate to name this truck "Truck." Sometimes, I think he'd come by not to hang out with me, but with it. As I said, we were boring, so we had to make our own fun. With an old Chevy engine we had our fill.

The quintessential memory of this was during my junior year after our 'Red and Blue Scrimmage,' the showcase for all of our fall sports teams at Brothers. The football team would play itself and the cross country team would run a very boring 5k around the entirety of the school... a couple of times. Other teams did stuff, but I had developed tunnel vision to keep from going insane. After the race was over, I walked out to my truck and couldn't get it to start. It was still early in the morning and it was cold, I had tried to choke it with the accelerator, but ended up flooding it. I called Mike up, and woke him with the words "Dude, Truck's being a bitch." He came out to school and said a few hellos to the varsity football team, which by this time had finished the game and was clacking across the parking lot in their cleats. We had to open up the carburetor and rev the engine to get some air in and it took two hands in the engine and someone inside with a foot on the accelerator. Not a rough fix, but it was better to have him there. After this, he rechristened Truck to Bitch and we headed off with our oh-so-refined palates to the Taco Bell down MLK boulevard so I could buy him breakfast.

When the vehicle worked, we'd load up the bed with junk and head out to the dump. Sacramento county has a landfill at Kiefer blvd and Grant Line road, and with the bed full of crap (the kind hoarded by our mothers) we'd tune the AM radio to one of its only two stations that played music (country), roll down the windows, and drive 65 mph down Hwy 16 to pass the afternoon. The most memorable trip comes to mind with Mike sweeping out the bed after we'd tossed everything saying: "Wouldn't it be fitting if this thing wouldn't start and we had to leave it here?" Of course to spite him, when he got in the damned thing gave him hell; the starter clicking and straining, insolent and hurt at such allegations that it belonged with the hideous antiques we had just junked. We got out in one piece -without burning out the starter- and headed back to town singing along to Alabama's If you're gonna play in Texas.

My dad sold the truck while I was in Germany, between my Senior and Freshman years, and began his trooper fetish. In the past 6 years he's gone through an equal number of troopers. A 1986 Red (engine subsequently scrapped for the blue one)  a 1989 Red (my current ride),  a 1986 Blue (restored and sold, then wrecked two weeks later), an '87 Silver (blew it's engine), a '91 White (totaled) and his shiny, "new" 1996 green one. Me dad was a mechanic for the Air Force and hasn't quite gotten it out of his system. It was easy to learn the new engines (mine is actually a Chevy engine) but it wasn't quite the same as the lumbering, 10 mpg V8. 

Never content with only one engine to play with, my dad recently went out and found a junker of a yellow 1979 Chevy Custom Deluxe and restored it. I'd never driven it before tonight; it's his baby. Tonight however, Petey cooked up a meal for us all, invited our father over (he brought the beer), and we dragged Mike in as he got home from work (Maria's in Denver for the week). After dinner, he took my trooper home and Mike and I headed off to Davis with the truck to move our desks.

It was like nothing had changed over the past 6 years. We hit the freeway, rolled down the windows and turned up the only station we could tune in, it was country of course.