I wasn’t anywhere near being alive in 1974. I’m 21 years old now. I WISH I was 21 years old in 1974, though. Every time I see old pictures of my dad and his prog-rock-listening, mustache-wearing stoner buddies from back when he was my age, I wish I had been around back then.
As far as a misspent youth, well, I’m still kind of young so I’m not sure if I’m done with my youth at this point or of I’m still experiencing it (and if so, whether or not I’m misspending it.) I can tell you that my high school years were a good mix of horrendously dangerous and delinquent behavior and mildly delinquent and hedonistic exciting behavior, punctuated by some athletic or academic achievements here and there to assure my parents that I wasn’t headed down a completely negative path. My parents are upper-class intellectuals from New York but in high school I was quick to fall in with the local-yokel, dirt bike riding crowd, mostly through being part of the wrestling team. I was quickly introduced to the world of cheap beer, Skoal, shoplifting, insanely dangerous driving, and other pastimes for Midwestern youth.
After wrestling was over, I played rugby, which introduced me to more open criminality. Our rugby team was like the haven for all the people who were too crazy, too stoned/drunk and too undisciplined for football. In fact, the second year I played, we had our school affiliation revoked because some guys had started a “fight club” and we weren’t even allowed to play at the school’s field anymore. We had to play in a fucking PUBLIC PARK! Anyway, through my association with all these people, I quickly became a mother’s worst nightmare (even though my dad was kind of proud of me, because I think he was kind of the same way when he was young.) A typical weekend evening would consist of drinking some cheap beer (which was usually stolen from our parents or a convenience store,) hanging out in various friends’ basements, convincing various slutty chicks to come over and debase themselves, and – if we were feeling adventurous – hopping into my friend C.R.’s Camaro and doing various insanely dangerous things out on the country roads, including racing down the left lane with our headlights off, turning them on right as a car approached us head-on, and then swerving away. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed. But it was all very, very thrilling, and I will always look back on those crazy nights with a lot of nostalgia. The smell of oil-stained garage floors and summer lawns at night will always take me back there. The summer-night air was always thick with the excitement of doing stuff you’re not supposed to be doing.
Right before I turned 15, I was arrested along with these psychopathic friends for nearly blowing up an old man’s truck, and creating an explosion that literally looked like a mushroom cloud about fifty feet high, by detonating a gigantic tank of gasoline in the parking lot of an empty baseball field out in the sticks. We all got cuffed and hauled to the sheriff’s office, and our summer of fun had come to an end. Fortunately we all got off with probation and a minimal (18 hours) period of community service, which I fulfilled by building a house for Habitat for Humanity, something I enjoyed doing so it wasn’t much of a punishment.
This incident fortunately got us to be a little less reckless. In my upperclassman years we got into 4x4 offroading instead of suicidal driving, which was a little safer. I got my wonderful 4Runner which was host to a great many rural adventures, though none of them involving any behavior more illegal than trespassing on off-road trails. I started doing better in school, getting summer jobs (mostly outdoors work, because I loved being able to be outside every day in the summer and be making money at the same time) and in fact I wound up doing so well that I was able to graduate from high school early. By this time I had kind of drifted away from my old friends and felt like I was ready to move on in life. Nothing against them, but I just felt like they were still the same guys that they’d always been, and I felt like I had changed. I was glad to be able to be done with high school early. I spent that summer mostly by myself - driving around in the country in my 4x4, getting high, listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers a lot and generally being introspective and trying to figure out what direction my life was going to go in. I didn’t mind spending so much time alone. I needed that time, after high school, to get to know myself better.
In college, I met the hipster crowd, started smoking a lot of weed and listening to a lot of indie music and making friends with people who my old high school buddies and I would have kicked the shit out of. I got more into my creative side, with music and drawing and writing (things I’d always been doing in high school as well, along with all the other stuff, but just not as seriously.) So my whole personality and lifestyle underwent a dramatic change. Eventually I kind of out-grew those hipsters too and their whole shtick, and developed more of my own unique personality that’s a combination of all the things that have influenced me growing up. So I’d say that my youth was not misspent at all, in fact it taught me a lot of lessons about life and gave me a lot of great stories as well. As a writer of fiction, you have to treat everything as a possible story. So that’s what I’ve learned to do.
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