The

Posted to Childhood on 19 July 2007.

by Todd—Age 35—Muncie, IN

My eighth-grade year burst into flames when my best friend Kess, whom I had known since birth, moved from Tulsa to New Orleans. I watched the explosion from the dark of my family’s living room. I couldn’t see his house from there, but I could see the moving truck driving away. I cried—howled as its red and amber and white lights disappeared behind trees and houses. I watched until the last ember faded to ash.

That Christmas, my parents sent me to New Orleans to spend a week with Kess. When he learned that I had taken up the electric guitar, he wanted me to hear something. He directed me to a chair in the den, put an off-white cassette in the home’s intercom system, cued it, and hit play. Sound echoed from the kitchen, the living room, the hallway, a bathroom. It was like hearing the Big Bang. Thunder and fire. Galaxies whirling into existence, stars bottle-rocketing. Then silence. Wind. Evolution. Frogs falling from the sky. The atomic bomb. Kess laughed when he saw the smoke billowing from my ears. He shushed me when I asked him who. He hit rewind. After another listen, he told me: “‘Eruption.’ Van Halen. From their first album,” and gave me the tape’s black case. I asked him to play it again while I stared at the superheroes on the cassette’s tiny album cover.

After celebrating New Year’s, I had to return home. At the airport, Kess and I parted ways with a high five à la 1987 and, before I disappeared onto the jetway, a wave. On the plane, and even for the next few months, I assumed one of us would always play Alex to the other’s Eddie. As we did when we pitched curveballs and fastballs. As we did when we biked to Quik Trip. As we did when we put together skits for talent shows. And as we did that week walking around Jackson Square. But everyday life ruled supreme, and the miles between New Orleans and Tulsa turned into silence the next year. When that got to be too much, I always put on Van Halen. That sound—that wild joy, that wild rage—was the star by which I steered my little Chevy through the dark nights of high school.

2 Comments