Riverside Revisited - Chapter 2, A Typical Friday Night

The social life at school was unusually bearable near the end of that last year. More than anything, this was due to the fact that soon we would be free and had no illusions about ever seeing each other again. There was not much love in that senior year of Riverside High. However, as the year wound down to the point where there was a point to start counting off the days, a spirit of camaraderie came lumbering out of the rank walls of locker rooms - throwing arms around the shoulders of football players you previously couldn't stand and fixing smiles (if only condescending ones,) onto the faces of all those girls who for the past five years would walk past you and give you the same acknowledgement they would to the locker you were leaning against. It was an atmosphere of superficial impermanence where the underlying sentiment was akin to 'Sure, I'll be nice and pleasent. Why not? In a matter of days, I'll never see you again.'

For me, it was a great relief. Despite its jocular tone and blatantly phoney air of geniality, it was very clear to me that this was the same behaviour I had noticed in all the adult situations I was ever privy to witness. The same condecension, the same excessive politeness that covered a repressed 'fuck you.' In awe I watched my classmates pretend to be grownups and in horror realized that this behavior had been going on since the May 24th weekend up in the Pinery where, not only did they play at being grownups - drinking too much and welcoming like long lost friends the same familiar faces they had ignored only two days earlier in Biology. But more absurd yet, they were playing house - the girls cooking and fetching beers and then later, in tents, holding in their arms the men who could hold no more beer, like brides on their wedding nights.

There was no better place to observe this behavior than at Yaybars which quickly became 'the' place to be on a Friday night. It was an era when the word 'partying' became synomonous with Friday night and increased in popularity at a rate which rendererd the word truly moronic.

Friday nights in Yaybars were conducted with all the empty-headed enthusiasm that went into the fall of Rome. The evening shared a sense of abandonment which seemed straight out of the Roaring Twenties - nothing but mindless, impersonal fun. No one was exempt from ridicule and everyone was everyone else's good friend.

It was at this circus that I would later find myself after leaving The Hill. Sometimes Coates would come along and if it was a good night in Yaybars, he would stay. In the spring of that year, Yaybars was packed as early as seven-thirty and it was the first bar I've ever had to stand in a line-up to get into - something which made it a local phenomenon. And stand we did. But never for long, for there were three other bars within a five-minute walk.

But to the pleasant surprise of its owners, Yaybars was everyone's first choice. With the roll-back of the drinking age to eighteen, business was booming and its success rested solely on the fact that of all the local bars, it was easily the largest. If you tired of the company at one table, you simply moved to another. An amazing number of people would wander around, lean against a wall, be asked to sit down or leave and end up sitting at the end of a half-deserted long row of tables. Girls came in with their boyfriends, spot their girlfriends as pre-arranged and the boys would push tables together so that after a while the table would be the length of the room. Conversation at these tables was almost impossible except for for whoever was sitting on either side of you. But with the mobile population of Yaybars, you were never sitting next to the same person for long anyway. People were always moving - flitting from one chair to the next, one table to another, from the ladies & escorts room to the back room. This was Yaybars most redeeming quality, you never had to spend an entire evening in only one person's company. You could have fifty conversations with fifty different people and they were all bombed enough that it made no difference that hours earlier in school you felt that you each thought "asshole" as you passed in the hall.

Although it never held much appeal to me, I went there because everyone else did. If I wanted to find a few people I liked, that was where they would be. Packed with so many people, you were bound to come across a friendly face or two. Not only that, there were a number of people who until then, you never had the chance to get familiar with. There was such a large number of good-looking Grade 11 or 12 girls there that you were astounded at how they even got to stay up that late, let alone get past the front door of a bar. Part of the reason for the Roaring 20s speakeasy atmosphere could be attributed to the fact that at least half the clientele were underage.

Most of the others had recently turned eighteen and there was a small group of graduates a year or two older who had become regulars. To all the impressionable Grade 11 girls, or for that matter all the girls who had once had hallway crushes on them, these were 'men' compared to us schoolboys who still had to carry books, could not talk of sharing classes with older sisters and and were not yet old enough to wear fading football jackets on off-hours from selling insurance or working on the line at Chryslers.

To give you an idea at what an overnight sensation that bar was, you would even get the odd teacher in there who would be greeted by shouts of their first name and even applause by the same people they were flunking. The whole thing was like a high-school reunion gone wild, only for the majority of people, they had only last seen each other a few hours before. And when I think about it now, it must have been that reunion aspect which appealeld to Coates - although he took a night in Yaybars about as seriously as I did.

... next installment - 'The Last Day of School.'

Riverside Revisited - Chapter 1, The Hill

A lot of you have written in lately asking me to do another serialization of some story I wrote back in my youth. Hence, Sonny Drysdale presents, 'Riverside Revisited' written almost 30 years ago about 'events' which had happened about seven years before.

This is for the kids in the 'PTBFR' group on The Facebook, of which I am proud to be a member. It involves the last day of Grade 13, a typical night in Abars and is a love story about being young and stupid. There are some clunkers in there (apprently dialogue isn't one of my strengths,) some funny reading - both intentional and otherwise and possibly a few recognizeable situations, characters and locations from back then. But keep in mind, this is 'fiction.' Heck, I didn't even go to Grade 13 at Riverside High.

It's either the first or second short story I ever finished and as such it shows the influence of my then two favorite literary influences - Jack Kerouac and Holden Caulfield. It's also about bittersweet nostalgia and with no apologies it owes a lot to my favorite TV show of the era in which when it was written, 'Brideshead Revisited.' As you sit down and read the first few paragraphs, open a window by your favorite reading chair, light a cigarette (even if you don't smoke,) sip a fine vintage wine, have the soundtrack to 'Brideshead' playing softly in the background - and most importantly, imagine the narrator speaking in the voice of Jeremy Irons.

... and away, we go!

... On warm spring evenings, Coates and I would walk down to the hill known as 'K-Mart Hill', sit on the side of it, drink a bottle of wine each, look down the railway tracks to the Detroit skyline, watch the occasional lone solitary figure walk down the tracks against the backdrop of Schillers Bush and then simultaneously launch into an imitation of ol' Neil warbling "see the lonely boy/Out On the Weekend," burst into laughter even though both of us were secretly moved by the sight of it - perhaps by the wine but more likely due to kinship and relating to that lonely soul recreating a cliche before our eyes as he moved down the rails on that backwards edge of suburbia.

We took our time drinking the wine, appeciating the combination of the relaxing effects of it flushing our cheeks as they were brushed by soft pre-summer breezes while the sun began its slow, gradual descent over the Detroit skyline eventually being swallowed up somewhere behind the Penobscot Building sometime after we had left the hill and gone on our own separate ways into the twilight of those oh-so-promising Friday nights which then held the potential that we could feel and believe that anything could happen, wild exciting things and if the situation was boring, the cheap wine carrying our giddy humour on wings of high-flung ecstacy acted as a guard which would stop anything that threatened to slow things down and bring the evening to any kind of banal finish. If any situation became mundane, it was only to all others, not ourselves.

That was the spring I was to leave Windsor. And when I look back on that time, those nights on 'the hill,' are the memories I am most fond of.

I was just finishing high-school then, Coates having graduated Grade 12 the year before, declining the opportunity of the Grade 13 education which I took, more out of a lack of better things to do than with anything else.

While I floated through an undemanding timetable of two English classes, two History's and countless spares, Wesley Coates slept. While I took my first lunch with Mugs and the Bunhead, standing and shuffling around in a courtyard which had been usurped into the 'smoking area,' Coates began to stir. As I took my second lunch the following period down at Matthews Confectionary, sipping a coke, leafing through the soap-opera magazines and bumming a smoke from one of the other student regulars, Coates would be drinking his first coffee. As I wandered through the rest of the afternoon's classes, almost lulled to sleep by the last period, Coates would be eating his main meal of the day and getting ready for work. As I walked home down the sun-baked gravel of Edgar Street, or if it was too hot, along the cool, shaded sidewalks of Saint Rose until I got to Isabelle, *my* street, and walked again in the direct heat of the sun, Coates was on his way to work. After I had eaten supper, I sat by the open window of my bedroom, feeling the spring air blow past as I read the current novel for one of my English classes. During all this time and for a number of hours after I had put away that particular book by Hemingway or Fitzgerald and had gone to sleep, Coates continued to do what he had been doing for most of that evening - taking hubcaps off a conveyor-belt and building them into tall ascending columns until it was time to start a new tower. At one o'clock, as I lay dreaming and silence lay over most of Windsor, Coates would punch a time-clock and count off another day until Friday when he would wake up at his normal time in the afternoon, this time not to get ready for work, but to get ready to go out and do what he had been waiting all week to do.

"See the lonely boy, Out on the Weekend, trying to make it pay ..."


... next installment - 'A Typical Friday Night'