The Stories We Could Tell

There’s a great line from a relatively unknown Tom Petty tune, and it goes a little something like this. “Oh the stories we could tell/And if this all blew up and went to hell/I could still see us sittin’ on the bed in some motel/Listenin’ to the stories we could tell.” If you are wondering it’s on the double album titled Pack Up the Plantation Live, and while I argue with my wife over TP’s being a cool looking dude as I think, or strange looking as she proclaims, there can be doubt that Petty and the Heartbreakers are one of the all-time great rock bands. This song in particular comes to mind because in a weeks time my fellow classmates from the Torrance High class of 1988 will be attending our 20 year reunion, and no doubt there will be some good story telling’ going on.

I regret that I won’t be able to attend, for a variety of reasons it just won’t work out this time around, but the 25 year reunion will be upon us before we know it and hopefully the timing on that one will work out. But while I won’t be there physically, I will certainly be there in spirit, and if I were I would no doubt be spinning some yarns, and even more assuredly be the subject of some stories, a few of which might even be true.

I was the guy who as my good buddy Gary Guagenti used to love to point out, was always the one at the party surrounded by a group of girls and laughing and talking smack. Not that I was some sort of player, nothing could be further from the truth, not for lack of trying but more from desire to end the night hanging with my buddies, kicking back at Carly’s or Ruiz’s place, eating whatever we could find in the fridge, or in Carly’s case, the microwave, which is where his mima would store all the good stuff. Ruiz’s was known for what our buddy James Lopez coined, cold stuff in a bowl, because there was always some leftover pasta dish that needn’t be heated up to be enjoyed. And Mima usually had a pot full of black beans on the burner that were good heated or lukewarm. That and the gigantic bowls of cereal that Ruiz would pour were our late night staples, and no girl no matter how pretty was better than hanging out with the boys, eating, ragging on each other, and then heading to the family room for some RBI baseball on Nintendo, often into the wee hours of the night. But I always did enjoy the conversation with the girls, and for that matter I still do.

We could tell plenty of stories about Hickory Park, which as young kids was our hangout to play over the line, or tennis when the courts were open, hoops on the blacktop where we’d come home with hands so black you’d think we were out working at the coal mines, and nothing was better than throwing down and posterizing your buddy on the 8 foot hoops. Or of course when the rain would come and leave good mud puddles was the perfect time to get an impromptu tackle football game together and run and splash around in the mud. I remember one game in particular when the rain was coming down and my buddy Will kept saying, a little rain never hurt anybody. True, but it didn’t make Mom too happy when you’d come home with mud stained clothes and rain soaked sneakers.

As we got older, Hickory Park became the central hangout on Friday and Saturday nights after we had spent countless hours driving around in search of parties that never materialized, or after blowing off the ones that did but that turned out to be lame. We could always meet at the park, the rocket ship was our north star, and the party would grow larger as one after another of our buddies would pull up in their monster trucks or Volkswagen Rabbits or Ford Fiestas or in my case, the alligator, my green Ford LTD station wagon, or by my senior year the rain drop, my little blue Toyota Tercel that took me all the way through college until I finally beat it all to hell. In hindsight, we could have saved ourselves a great deal of time and gas money just meeting at the park in the first place, as that’s where we always had the best times, just hanging out, blaring tunes, enjoying a beverage or two, and being young.

Friday night football games at the stadium and going to Carl’s Jr. after for burgers and planning out the rest of our night, which of course usually wound up at Hickory Park. Wilson Park for fireworks on the 4th of July, lunchtime at Sandwich Plus, which has what I still consider to be the best tuna sandwiches ever created by man, and believe me, I am somewhat of an expert on tuna sandwiches. Dances in the gym where we had to take our shoes off because Coach Strong had just had a new floor put in and didn’t want it scuffed up, and the inevitability of White Lines and Money Money, hey motherf**…, well, you know the rest of the chant. Pep rallies on Friday mornings with the spirit stick, which we won as freshman, probably the first time ever which just went to show what a special class we were. Hookups and breakups too numerous to count, and always one of your buddies fighting with his girlfriend over something stupid, which made you glad you didn’t have a girlfriend to fight with at the time.

Eating those incredible apple fritters that were sold at snack, our little 15 minute break period between 2nd and 3rd periods. Walking to Steve’s Burgers with Lissa and Chere at lunch freshman year before we could drive anywhere. To this day if I happen to notice the time at 12:18 I think of how that was our lunch time for four years at THS.

Mr. Miller’s ties, Mrs. Wright’s passion, Coach Buscia’s jokes, Mr. Simon’s pointer stick that somebody once glued to the table so that it broke when he picked it up, and Mr. Pillet’s rug, which looking back on it was concrete proof that that dude was stoned out of his mind when he left the house every day for school.

Mrs. Jennings, our sophomore English teacher that every guy with a straight bone in his body had the hots for, and Mrs. Salcedo, our even hotter Spanish teacher who taught us Espanol with a British accent. Senior Stassi and Mr. Hulse, who although I never had him was rumored to be so tough that if you dropped your pencil you couldn’t even pick it up, apparently he was the soup Nazi of the Math Department. I only knew him as Coleen’s dad who would come to our baseball games often and one time came down to the dugout and gave me a good, and well deserved dressing down for not hustling or something like that.

And I will never forget Mr. Burger and the arena, I probably learned more in his driver’s ed class just listening to him read the paper and talk about current events and telling us stories about the old days at THS. These are just some of the many random memories I have and a handful of the countless stories I could tell.

So while I won’t be there with you at some hotel in Long Beach on Saturday night, know that if I were I would be right in the thick of it, cracking jokes and most certainly being the butt of many of them. Somehow I would get the credit for doing something silly even when I had nothing to do with it, as in, that’s something Nicholas would have done. But I always took it as a sign of love, and I hope that all my classmates know that the love was always mutual, even if as a typically insecure teenager I didn’t always do a good job of showing it like I should have.

While I wouldn’t want to be any other age than I am right now, nor in any other place in my life, I have so many great memories of the years between 1984, when we came in from our respective grade schools wide-eyed and not knowing what to expect, to 1988 and our final graduation party at Michele Gregory’s, where we celebrated the culmination of our experience together by breaking in Gary’s new high tech 6 way gallon sized beer bong. Enjoy the time together, take plenty of pictures and tell lots of stories, and I will be thinking of all of you and looking forward to hopefully being at the next one in five short years.