Originally there were three of us. Scott P., Stephen S. and myself. We were an oddball crew. Scott was the smart "husky" from a broken home, Stephen was the short clown, who learned to juggle and ride a unicycle, and I was the tall doofus that stuttered. I say I was the doofus because I didn’t have an identity then. I was absent, silent, and rarely spoke. And could sit for hours with either of them without saying more than ten words. I imagine it was creepy for them at times, but I don’t know.
We lived not far from each other in a suburb of Washinton. Scott lived across the street with his mother, his sister and eventually his grandmother, in a house very similar to the one I lived in. It was painted white though and was on a hill. The fenced in backyard was a steep drop down to one of the only true alleys in the neighborhood, where the backs of houses could be seen through the trees.
Scott’s older sister was the same age as my second oldest sister, but Lisa was beautiful in a way that was unique on the block. She was young, thin, drove her own car, smoked cigarettes like her mother and cussed. She was the last generation of kids in my neighborhood to wear bell-bottoms unconsciously. Denim jackets and roach clip held feathers in her long straight black hair made her look American Indian, exotic and out of place. Bruce Springstein’s Born to Run would be blasting from her room as I walked up the stairs towards Scott’s bedroom. The door would fling open and she would race down the stairs past me, and then I would glimpse her profile. She was forever moving away from the house, the neighborhood, her mother, and me. I was comfortable with that, as I could rarely speak to her and could never look at her in the face for more than a second. Her physical presence made me flush. Most of my time in that house was spent looking at the creamy wall to wall carpet or a TV screen. How irritating that must have been.
Scott’s mother was pack-a-day Benson & Hedges smoker that was very depressed. Lacking the experience and perception to correctly identify it as a problem, I was never put off by the dark rooms, her slurred speech, or distant gaze. The lack of scrutiny of my person was welcome. I would ring the doorbell at her home and she would open it and either start moving towards the kitchen waving a hand up the stairs towards Scott’s bedroom, or she would hold fast to the door, preparing to send me away. This went on for years, with intermittent breaks as other kids in the neighborhood gained favor with Scott or his family, but I outlasted them. Scott would never answer the door. Running interference for Scott was one of Mrs. P.'s jobs, and I could tell instantly if I was going to enter or be brushed off.
Scott would never come over to my house and I never though it strange. Why would he? I had nothing to offer, but Scott had an open fridge and a long list of possessions that he shared freely with me. His father, who lived in the District, provided the games.
Singularly, it was the Atari game console that drew me across the street. Star Raiders, Combat, Adventure, Night Driver, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust, Midnight Magic, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, dominated the afternoons after school. At weekend sleepovers, hours were spent in silent coke and cookie fueled sessions with the black and red button joystick. The TV glow would grow to outline our frames behind us on the creamy carpet as the sun set. No lights were turned on to replace it.
It is hard to put a date one when I started going over to Scott’s, both of us were born in the neighborhood at the same time. I do know when it stopped.
