More ridiculous stories of my youth | Mark’s Remarks
Sometimes I start telling stories to my friends or family, and as I’m telling the story, what seems to be a normal reminiscing turns into a tale in which the audience begins to look at me as if I came from some foreign land with strange customs and mysterious practices.
It happened the other day when Michelle and I started talking about “cruising” and “parking” in high school. I think most of our kids were there and maybe a few friends when the tale began. As I said, the more I told it, the stranger it seemed. Moreover, I was a little impressed that I remembered most of the details almost 40 years later.
So, when I was in high school I got a job at the local teen hangout, which was a taco restaurant. It was a place where people would drive through for a tex-mex meal or even come in for a sit-down meal. The teens who hung out there, however, would come in and get sodas or a small order of nachos; things that they were able to afford on babysitting salaries or carry-out boy wages.
But really, a lot of the kids would come in to get reports on who had been in and who had not. “Have you seen” and “Has so-and-so been in here or driven through” were typical conversation starters.
If you worked “front” that evening, which meant you were working the counter and not doing dishes in the back, you had to more or less keep track of everyone coming or going. You might even be the bearer of bad news if a jilted boyfriend came in to see if his former main squeeze was with some new guy, or vice versa.
Indeed, at times, especially later in the evening, working the front counter could be likened to being a bartender to whom the customers would come in seeking advice while they drown their sorrows in a jumbo size Mountain Dew or Diet Pepsi.
But the part about the taco restaurant/gossip den/therapy office wasn’t the strangest part. As I began to recall the parking lots in town and obvious designation of each parking lot, the story became really strange.
You see, in my hometown, which was small but not quite as small as neighboring towns, Friday and Saturday nights were designated as “hangout” nights where kids would drive west on Main Street, take a left through the Dairy Queen parking lot, head east on Delaware, take a left through the park, circle the park and pool, then head back to Main Street to start the whole process over again. Kids from towns to the north, west, and sometimes the east would join in the cruising. This route would be driven several times over the course of Friday and Saturday night.
But in order to properly cruise on those evenings, one had to find a place to park at times. I mean, gas was $1.12. Too much cruising could make you financially embarrassed.
While cruising around town, you could find out a lot of things. Nearing the taco restaurant, you could look to the left and see kids from a neighboring town up north, parked in the parking lot of the closed business next door which was some type of tool company. This is where they typically parked their trucks for the evening.
Since they were in close proximity to the taco restaurant, most of these “northern kids” would walk over from their parked cars, and buy the regular items from our menu. Along the way, most of us working the counter got to be friends with the northern kids, who I remember as very friendly and a lot of fun. They were all from a small farming community and were no strangers to hard work and down-to-earth ideals.
Town kids actually chose two main parking lots to hang out in, both the taco restaurant and also down the road at Dairy Queen. In my memory, I think there were class differences and also somewhat of a hierarchy system in place for this whole unspoken hangout map, and even though everyone acted as if it were casual or non-existent, it was well-known where certain people parked.
The kids who were a little rough around the edges and from all over the place and various towns, usually parked and congregated at the burger joint to the southeast.
Most of us left those kids alone.
I remember it being a scandalous thing a few nights when “new” kids had decided to park on the spots of some of the northern kids, who parked there anyway and were probably nice about it yet somehow made it clear that this was their territory. Our town kids, on the other hand, defended their boundary lines and probably stood in big groups where the meanest kids would scowl or stare for long periods of time to make the newbies uncomfortable.
On at least one occasion, kids from a community to the east came to town and, to our knowledge, were there for some type of rumble. Now, this almost sounds like gang activity or something, but I really think it was over some type of jilted romantic thing and I remember it being a big deal.
You see, those kids had their own cruising and parking routine. They rarely darkened our door unless something was serious.
Speaking of serious topics, if some type of such talk between people was happening, it most likely happened in the park in a small, circular parking lot near the duck pond. Once in a while, you might see someone parked on the courthouse square, sitting around the fountain. Usually, these were older kids, more secure in their hangout patterns and who were not concerned with much, other than getting out of high school and becoming adults.
I think by the time I finished going through these memories, I had lost most of the audience who’d been in attendance at the beginning. As I said, I may have been the only person who thought this tale was worthy of a conversation – or publication, for that matter.
I could tell you all the many “make out” routes in town too and make you think I was some type of teenage operator.
But heck, I’d have to admit everyone in town knew where they were and most of the time, these places were more legendary than places that were actually used for any romance.
And after all, this is a family show.