Misspent Youth

Among the features of my misspent youth were high school keg parties held by the hicks my group normally disdained. I write “keg parties” somewhat ironically in so much as it makes me sound like a middle aged man (which I am) who has come across his child’s “drug pipe.” Never would I have referred to a keg as a “keg party,” but things change as we grow older. We begin to accept what our younger selves would have held in utter contempt. I wear khaki pants nearly everyday now, for example. I covet of my neighbor’s grill, his well-maintained lawn, his ease discussing amortization. I enjoy antique stores.

Here I am, a couple years out from fifty, square pants to match my square car, and I bear not even a whiff of fond nostalgia for those teenage years in the Valley. When I think back, I mostly remember driving around at night looking for weed or someone to buy us beer. We listened to Butthole Surfers, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, the Dead Milkmen. We gathered in small groups. We got drunk outside. Sometimes we’d get chased by some Upper Skagit rednecks come down the Valley for some fun. “Fuckin’, fishin’, and fightin’” were and are common pursuits. It was never entirely clear for which they might have pursued us. Even so, we all went to parties out at Koet’s Mill, Pillchuck Falls, or the Gravel Pit where some asshole in flannel and a shearling-lined Levi jacket served Rainer draft for a couple of dollars a cup out of the back of his pickup. Lynard Skynard was a staple at the these gatherings. Molly Hatchet and Led Zeppelin were high in the rotation too, but the music I most associate with these parties is the Steve Miller Band, most notably their Greatest Hits: 1974-78. You knew it was time to leave when people started to rewind the Joker. With drunkenness, repressed urges for emotional connection manifested in overly aggressive male affection. Young men would grab each other around the necks and sing along to “some people call me Maurice”, believing in that moment they understood “the pompatus of love.” It was a sure sign fighting would break out at any moment.

I hated the Steve Miller Band. It represented everything I disliked about the Valley—rural machissmo, small mindedness, rigid thinking, classic rock—but the other day I heard Abrcadabra and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s not part of Greatest Hits 1974-78, but I have since listened to the album on Spotify and enjoyed it, even if it did trigger some of those old hatreds, soft and blunt though they now are. Somehow I like Steve Miller.