little girl ask Arnie loudly, âWhy is your face all messy like that, mister?â
I drove a mile and a half down to JFK Drive, whichâaccording to my mother, who grew up in Libertyvilleâused to be at the center of one of the townâs most desirable neighborhoods back around the time Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Maybe renaming Barnswallow Drive for the slain President had been bad luck, because since the early sixties, the neighborhood around the street had degenerated into an exurban strip. There was a drive-in movie, a McDonaldâs, a Burger King, an Arbyâs, and the Big Twenty Lanes. There were also eight or ten service stations, since JFK Drive leads to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Getting Arnieâs tire should have gone lickety-split, but the first two stations I came to were those self-service jobbies that donât even sell oil; thereâs just gas and a marginally retarded girl in a booth made of bullet-proof glass who sits in front of a computer console reading a National Enquirer and chewing a wad of Bubblicious Gum big enough to choke a Missouri mule.
The third one was a Texaco having a tire sale. I was able to buy Arnie a blackwall that would fit his Plymouth (I could not bring myself then to call her Christine or even think of herâ it âby that name) for just twenty-eight-fifty plus tax, but there was only one guy working there, and he had to put the new tire on Arnieâs wheel-rim and pump gas at the same time. The operation stretched out over forty-five minutes. I offered to pump gas for the guy while he did it, but he said the boss would shoot him if he heard of it.
By the time I had the mounted tire back in my trunk and had paid the guy two bucks for the job, the early evening light had become the fading purple of late evening. The shadow of each bush was long and velvety, and as I cruised slowly back up the street I saw the dayâs last light streaming almost horizontally through the trash-littered space between the Arbyâs and the bowling alley. That light, so much flooding gold, was nearly terrible in its strange, unexpected beauty.
I was surprised by a choking panic that climbed up in my throat like dry fire. It was the first time a feeling like that came over me that yearâthat long, strange yearâbut not the last. Yet itâs hard for me to explain, or even define. It had something to do with realizing that it was August 11, 1978, that I was going to be a senior in high school next month, and that when school started again it meant the end of a long, quiet phase of my life. I was getting ready to be a grown-up, and I saw that somehowâsaw it for sure, for the first time in that lovely but somehow ancient spill of golden light flooding down the alleyway between a bowling alley and a roast beef joint. And I think I understood then that what really scares people about growing up is that you stop trying on the life-mask and start trying on another one. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
The feeling passed, but in its wake I felt shaken and melancholy. Neither state was much like my usual self.
When I turned back onto Basin Drive I was feeling suddenly removed from Arnieâs problems and trying to cope with my ownâthoughts of growing up had led naturally to such gigantic (at least they seemed gigantic to me) and rather unpleasant ideas as college and living away from home and trying to make the football team at State with sixty other qualified people competing for my position instead of only ten or twelve. So maybe youâre saying, Big deal, Dennis, I got some news for you: one billion Red Chinese donât give a shit if you make the first squad as a college freshman. Fair enough. Iâm just trying to say that those things seemed really real to me for the first time . . . and really frightening. Your mind takes you on trips like that sometimesâand
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