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'
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'
posted by Sonny Drysdale at 11:13 AM
4 Comments:
Hells Bells, Sonny, do we gotta wait another 30 years for the next installment?
I already did the wine-drinking, sitting on the hill, watching the world go by thing.
I never thought to write about it.
I just figured it was a "given" that everyone my age did about the same thing.
Had we access to smart phones and tweets, we might have amused ourselves even further.
This reminiscence of yours did, however, give me pause to wonder what that particular Neil Young song was, "Out On the Weekend".
I don't remember it at all (which just shows what a King Crimson fan knows about Canadian artists of the time - I was still grooving to the tunes of the British Invasion, no matter what their bent.)
And so it goes...
We live, we learn.
Always happy to learn where you've lived, Bob.
..er, Sonny.
And yet another hot dry day for Isabelle residents, unless they've had access to some wine - then it's merely hot hot hot.
Keep cool, brother!
Hold it, you mean to tell me that someone out there is actually waiting to read the rest of this thing? Okay, I'll get busy.
Yep... awesome. All of it!
Post a Comment
<< Home