Summer 2003 - Last Summer of Freedom

When I hear songs from The Ataris album “So, Long Astoria, it takes me back to the summer of 2003 after my first year of community college. That was probably one of the best summers of my life, and I wish I could go back to those times often. It was so great because I had no real worries or responsibilities that summer. I was finally old enough in my parent’s eyes to stay out as late as I wanted and pretty much come and go as I pleased.


That summer I had quit my job as the manager of Magic Pan Pizza, a local shop in Amherst, Ohio to go and paint houses with my best friend Ben. His dad had done house painting for years in Amherst and built up quite a reputation, but before the summer started his dad was promoted to the Chief of the Fire Department and passed the painting business on to Ben. I was pretty awesome working for Ben. We would start work at 7 a.m. and work until around 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I seem to remember we painted a lot of houses for old ladies, and everything we painted was pink. We made pretty good money for a couple of 18 year olds. But now that I look back on it we could have worked a little harder and we would have made a lot more. I still got my bills paid though and was able to take Lindsey out whenever.

Usually after we would finish painting we would go and hang out at Ben’s house and hang out in the pool or play video games with our other friends, David and Dave. We played Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Grand Theft Auto III and GTA Vice City for hours at a time just rotating players and surfing the internet. We also drank Coca-Cola by the truckload that summer, and I wouldn’t be lying if we went through a case a day. Luckily Ben’s mom loved us all and kept more than enough on hand.

After hours of seclusion in Ben’s house, we would set off to cruise around town. We always ended up at Dunkin Donuts to hang out with all of the other car guys in town. Lindsey always made fun of us, but we would stay there sometimes until 2 or 3 in the morning before going home. If nothing was going on at Dunkin, we would just go and drive around and bullshit about life for a while until we felt like going home. We would always take Ben’s car, a 1992 Eagle Talon TSI, when it was running, or his mom’s Mercury Topaz, and we would just drive anywhere. Most of the time it was out in the country, Oberlin and Wellington areas because we could go fast and be stupid. We also always took Bens cars because his dad was the Fire Chief, we never got pulled over around town.

We did all sorts of dumb things that summer, it’s a miracle that no one got hurt or ended up in jail for something. One day we found an old pellet handgun, so we got the great idea that we should take Ben’s dad’s Red Rider BB Gun (like the one from A Christmas Story) and have a shootout inside of Ben’s house. This lasted until we all ran out of BB’s and no one was hurt, everyone walked away with both eyes and there wasn’t one broken window in the house. But that didn’t matter to Bens’ parents who were quite mad because there were BB’s all over the house that the cats could swallow, and that the Red Rider was Ben’s dads from his childhood. We also did some stupid things in our cars like drive way to fast in the country and trying to hit hills so fast that we would catch air in the car or Dave’s truck. One time, I remember we were in Dave’s truck and had Ben in the bed while we went over these hills at about 90 mph, and then Ben drove and Dave got in the bed of the truck to see what it felt like. We only did it once because after that we realized that if something went wrong at least one person would die. I think it was a few weeks later that Dave got pulled over going way to fast with Ben in the back. Luckily the state trooper didn’t have his radar on when he caught us and just gave Dave a warning. It didn’t hurt that he was also the same officer that handled the accident that Ben and Dave got in about a year earlier.

On Wednesday nights we would almost always be headed out to Norwalk to go watch the drag races at Norwalk Raceway Park. There were a few occasions that we all took our own crappy cars out there and raced them, but mostly we just hung out and watched. This was also one of my favorite nights because 1. I love cars and racing, and 2. Lindsey usually got come out with us. Her mom usually didn’t like her going out on week nights or ever really. I loved getting out there and being around all of the sights and smells of the raceway. I remember on time we were going out to the track with one of our other friends, and he didn’t have the $10 to get in so before we got there we pulled over and he got in the trunk of my car so we could sneak him in. Ben and I continued on to the gate to pay, and as we were waiting in line to get in, we started messing with the guy in the trunk by turning up my stereo which had (2) 12 inch subwoofers in the trunk, and he started banging on the trunk to get us to stop, but there was nothing he could do about it. We finally turned it down and got him to calm down as we approached the gate so we didn’t get busted and kicked out.

One particular Wednesday night, Ben or I will never forget. Ben had to get a hair cut before we left for the track and I as usual, was starving. So as he got his hair cut, I went to Burger King to get some food before we headed out to the track. We at the food on the 45 minute ride out to the track, and about 10 minutes before we got to the track, my stomach started making funny noises. And before I knew it, I really had to go to the bathroom, like bad. Unfortunately for me, there was no immediate place to go, and even though we were so close to the track, I needed to stop now. I spotted a row of trees in a field coming up on the side of the road, and told Ben that we need to stop because I had to go to the bathroom. He immediately thought I was joking and began laughing histerically. So I pulled over ran out of the car,and jumped the guardrail on the side of the road. As I began running through the field, at full speed, I could feel my stomach not wanting to wait any longer for me to find a place to squat down. And at that very moment, I stepped in a tractor rut that was hidden by all of the tall grass, my leg stopped moving because it was in the hole, but the rest of my body keep going and I twisted my knee around. As my body spun through the air, Ben laughing in the background, and the intense pain coming from my leg, by bowels decided that now was a good time to release, and I crapped my pants there in the field. One minute Ben saw me running, and the next I was gone, laying in pain in the tall field grass. I yelled for him to come and help me because I was in such great pain. I told him to grab my workout clothes from the back seat and the University of Toledo class catolog so that I could clean myself up. I attempted to stand up and almost fell over because my knee seemed to be bending the wrong way. After hobbling over to the tree line I was originally trying to get to, I managed to change my pants, and clean my self up as much as I could. I somehow made it back to my car where Ben, a friend I am forever in debt too for all his help in this situation, was still laughing his head off. He drove me back to Amherst Hosptial and called my parents and Lindsey for me and we all sat in the waiting room laughing about my unfortunate situation. Now I had orginially thought that I had broke my leg/knee cap, turns out I only severly twisted it and needed to stay off of it for a week or so. After a few days in bed and only moving around the upstairs of my parents house, I tried to go out and see Lindsey that Saturday night and missed a step going down the stairs and re-twisted my knee. It still bothers me sometimes to this day.

That summer was also the first time Ben and I had a shared birthday party. See Ben was born on June 24, 1984, and I was born on June 27, 1984, and since we were such good friends it only made sense we had a party together. I remember it being a pool party at Ben’s house and all of our friends were there. I also remember that Ben’s mom got us an Ice Cream Cake from Dairy Queen, and we ate that thing for about a week. This was also the time that we realized that one of Ben’s cats, Kitty, really liked Ice Cream Cake. It was the weirdest thing.

Right after our birthdays was the Fourth of July, and what do a couple of 19 year old kids to with their summer money in the boring Ohio summer? Well, go to Sandusky and buy fireworks of course. I remember going and buying these ones that were really cheap, like 5 for $6, and they were definitely worth the money. To light them you had to stick them on a piece of wood with a nail in it and they would sit on nail. After you lit it, it would spin around for a few seconds and then shoot up in the sky about 50 feet and explode with colors and make a loud bang. Well when we went to the store initially we only bought one box because we didn’t know what they did, but after we found out we went back the next day and bought about $50 worth of these things. They were cool for a while, but eventually we got bored with just lighting them off by themselves. So we decided that we would find something to strap to it see what happens. Well what we ended up finding was one of those poofy haired troll dolls that Ben had from a long time ago. So we tape this doll to the little rocket and took it into his back yard along with a video camera. I was taping as Ben lit it, Dave watched from behind a picnic table and Ben’s mom watched from the back patio laughing at our dumbasses. Needless to say, the launch didn’t go as planned. We didn’t account for the weight of the troll on the rocket and when it started to spin, the board it was on tipped over and shot right at us. I got the spinning part on tape, but when it turned over and shot at me I started running and all you could see was the ground and me and Ben cursing to get out of the way and Ben’s mom laughing hysterically at us. Unfortunately the video didn’t turn out that well due to the technology at the time or else I am pretty sure we could have won some money from America’s Funniest Home Videos. After that incident we had like 10 – 20 of these things left over, and we ended up driving around one night lighting them and throwing them out of the car or putting them in people’s mailboxes to see what they would do.

This was also the summer that Ben’s girlfriend at the time was working at Hastee Tastee, the local ice cream hangout in downtown Amherst. We would go up there all the time to see her. It was a little ridiculous how much time we spent there just so he could talk to her in between the orders she was taking. I love Ben, but that was probably one of the worst parts of the summer because while they were all googely eyed over each other, I was there by myself bored out of my mind.

Lindsey worked a lot that summer. Since she had just graduated high school and was getting ready to go off to Toledo for college she was trying to save money. With work and her mom hardly ever letting her out the house, we didn’t get to see each other as often as I would have liked. That summer she also spent 2 weeks in Spain and Paris with a group from school. Although she worked more than I did and her mom watched her like a hawk, we did get to spend a lot of time together. We would hang out at my parent’s house and watch movies or go swimming over Ben’s. We spent as much time together that summer as we could and let our love for each other keep growing.

2003 was also the summer of the massive blackout that knocked out all electrical power around most of the states surrounding the Great Lakes. I remember it well, I took a nap that afternoon and when I woke up nothing worked, lights, fans, T.V.’s, nothing. This was not really that unusual at first because sometimes when it would get very hot outside the power grid would overload and shut down from all of the air conditioners and fans running. But after an hour or so of nothing coming back on we started to get worried, and after checking the radio we heard that it was a blackout. I immediately called Lindsey at work to make sure that when she left she drove carefully. I then called Ben to see what he was doing and he said he was on his way over to pick me up and that we had a mission. Turns out that Ben’s dad, Wayne, needed us to go around and see if we could get as much gasoline as possible for his fish tanks. See Wayne had a side business breeding fish and had about 50 fish tanks in their basement, and if he couldn’t keep his generator running while the power was out he was going to lose money if the fish died. The problem was he couldn’t go to any gas stations for gas because the pumps ran off electricity and since the power was out he needed another solution. So Ben and I went around and got gas for his generator from my parents, Lindsey’s mom, and my grandparents since they were out of town we took all we could. My mom was worried about us driving around in the blackout because of the idiot drivers that don’t realize that when the power is out and the traffic lights don’t work, the intersection becomes a 4 way stop. After driving around getting gas we went back out on the town as usual for a summer night, except this time everything was black. It was really weird not seeing any lights on anywhere. I think the power was out for probably 8 to 10 hours that day. It didn’t come back on until later at night when we were hanging out at Dave’s house.

A few weeks after my knee incident, my summer was quickly coming to an end. I had to stop painting with Ben, and pack up my room to go away to Toledo.