In high school, my friends and I thoroughly enjoyed skipping
class in favor of driving off campus. We weren’t usually up to anything too
nefarious, but leaving the panoptic gaze of school was exhilarating. Usually
the goal was to eat food that wasn’t from the cafeteria or to smoke cigarettes
in someone’s garage. On one occasion, we were sitting and eating lunch at a Chinese
buffet on Westerly Parkway and the entire administrative team from the school
showed up to eat lunch at a booth across from us. Somehow we weren’t busted. On
another occasion, we went to get ice cream at Meyer’s Dairy during Doc Arnold’s
science class. We were in John’s SUV and he had a car phone, which was a pretty
big deal back in the day. In an act of hubris/stupidity we called the very
classroom where we were supposed to be and asked the teacher if he wanted
anything. (This was back when classrooms had landlines). While angry, Arnold
never ratted us out, probably because he was remarkably inappropriate towards
the teenaged girls in the class and did not want any undue attention to come
his way. Seriously, that guy said some things that probably should have gotten
him fired and/or imprisoned.
On a particularly beautiful autumnal afternoon, Andrew and I
decided that we were going to go driving in the mountains instead of attending
our afternoon classes. We drove up past Bear Meadows and wended our way around
the Seven Mountains. At a certain point, Andrew’s 1978 Corolla (the first car in
which I ever experienced 100 MPH) stopped functioning correctly. In a
wonderfully poetic move, the orange Toyota would drive perfectly well on flat
terrain, but would stall as it tried to go up hills. We were, of course,
several mountains away from home and deep inside the Pennsylvania woods.
Anyway, we ended up getting the car to a random stranger’s house (always a
great idea for high-school students), and asked to use her phone. Our first
call was to my girlfriend at the time. She laughed at the prospect of picking
us up, and probably believed us to be getting our just deserts. The second car
was to Brian, who had a ’64 Mustang and was more than happy to come retrieve
us. However, he was delayed in arriving, and I started to understand that I was
fucked. My parents would be arriving home soon, and I was miles away in the
middle of the woods. I ended up calling my dad to come get me; he was not
impressed and did not speak on the forty-five minute ride home. As punishment,
I had to forfeit a super-long band trip to Punxsutawney, which in retrospect
seems like a pretty nominal penalty. However, at the time it was devastating because
of the unsupervised nature of bus trips and the fact that I had a girlfriend (albeit
one unwilling to drive deep into the woods to a random stranger’s house to pick
up a truant sixteen-year-old, which seems perfectly reasonable now that I’m writing it).
(An Orange 1978 Corolla like Andrew used to have).
I had and have a certain nostalgia for those woods, and try
to go back there whenever I return to PA, which is rare these days. In any
case, on one such return trip when I was around twenty, I was driving around
those mountain roads in my 1987 Plymouth Caravelle (The Eight-Seven). I never
took a map while exploring because all of the roads ended up somewhere. On this
particular trip, I ran into a dead end in the woods. It was like a big cul-de-sac
but with nothing but woods in every direction. There were come cars parked
there, so I figured it was a trailhead or something along those lines. A guy was
asking something and moving towards my car, and I rolled down the window. I
assumed he was looking for directions or whatever. He seemed to be mumbling,
but I didn’t think much of it until he got extremely close and could hear that
he was saying “blow job.” Once I deciphered his words, I immediately left the
area and made my way out of the woods. However, the encounter created more
questions than it answered. Was this a scenario that involved payment for
services rendered, or was it a reciprocal agreement? Was I in a spot where such
things were common, or was he just taking a shot in the dark? I left before I
could find out, so I don’t really have a satisfying end to this story—except for
the fact that I’m alive and did not have to give/get a blow job from an old
creepy guy in the middle of the woods in Pennsylvania.
