We knew the adjustment period on our new Houston residence was going to be brief even before the last piece of furniture was moved. During the transition, the renters bailed on our house in Springfield. When Dad announced the sudden trip back “home,” Brian and I saw a silver lining to this misfortune; a chance to be reunited with the world we left behind. Little did I know this journey would result in me embracing Houston and large cities ever since.
First came the drive north. Dad chose a more interesting, efficient route than the one during the move. We took I-45 from Houston to Dallas which was a smoother experience and we only took the new car (a 1983 Nissan) instead of two. I recall everybody but Dad sleeping through the bulk of that leg; we left really late in the evening due to a visit from Cousin Denise with her husband.
We passed through Dallas around 6 AM on a Saturday morning. Big D seemed okay. More centralized than Houston with its downtown skyline and a sleight resemblance to Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis. Never got to see the city again until 1994.
Then we shifted to I-35 (the freeway of Austin) to OKC. From OKC came I-44 to Missouri which eventually would lead to St. Louis. Oklahoma was my first experience on a turnpike, the most brilliant speed trap ever invented; it explained why Dad decided to kill 30 minutes at the Roy Rogers oasis. For those of you who aren’t familiar with turnpikes, ask a resident of Oklahoma, Pennsylvania or New Jersey on how to get a ticket on one.
After being cooped up in the car for over 15 hours, we crashed at the Holiday Inn in Joplin, MO. We didn’t relax that much in the hotel room since there was a trip to the local mall which was highlighted by Mom buying some odd sketch of Brian and me. Grandma wound up with it. Maybe it was a gift but it felt like a cruel joke.
Sunday was more scenic and interesting. I think all those billboards plugging Meramac Caverns along I-44 to St. Louis worked. We stopped to check it out and got the whole tour explaining how Jesse James and his gang used it to ditch the authorities after a heist. It certainly made up for the earlier disappointment in Rolla when we discovered its A&W restaurant folded; Brian and I had been there last Summer thanks to a really grueling “camping” trip with our grandparents.
We arrived at Grandma’s house in Bloomington sometime Sunday evening and our grandparents were still awake to socialize before bed. Hard to believe everyone was glad to see each other after the tension from Christmas; Grandma and Grandpa came to Houston for Christmas and didn’t leave until Valentine’s Day. I know I was somewhat relieved to be surrounded with the familiar even if it sucked; besides, Springfield was an hour away. How bad could it be?
Monday morning answered my rhetorical question.
My memory gets fuzzy here but I remember the house wasn’t trashed. There were no major holes in the walls, bodily fluids in the carpeting, metal fixtures removed or anything requiring the authorities to condemn the place. We did spend the rest of the month painting, vacuuming, etc.; to remove any traces of the deadbeats. It couldn’t have been a physical disaster because we didn’t have to work on the house every day or pay a general contractor to remove any squalor. I saw much, much worse things in college cleaning up dorm rooms so we got off easily.
Working on our former home quickly became a source of friction. Mom and Dad had one memorable spat resulting in Mom taking off with the car, stranding the rest of us in Springfield for a couple hours. Most of it was just the general laziness parents get from their teenage offspring. Brian and I were kids. We couldn’t comprehend the severity of the situation. Painting and cleaning ate into the time we wanted to spend hanging out with our old friends Eric, Chet, Chris and anybody else who came by. I feel most dropped in to sincerely visit and catch up not out of schadenfreude, my mother’s primary, paranoid belief. She was generous enough to let Eric come back to Bloomington with us to hang out for a couple days. Being an uber-nerd, I had packed my D&D books so I was stoked to have him around to play (Brian hated it) since I didn’t get to play as often as I used to in Houston.
Dad was spared the majority of this crap. He went back to Houston after a week or so due to his job. The rest of us stayed with the cool, new car and attempted to get the house ready for the market again as Reaganomics had set the economy on fire…NOT!
The biggest highlight I was looking forward to on this trip was visiting my surprise pen pal Kim. Surprise? Well, I was never a big letter writer as a kid. Sending even a birthday card to my grandparents was a chore. After the move to Houston, the misery of displacement served as a muse to write those I missed in Springfield. Receiving one from this female classmate was a shock. We weren’t particularly close at St. Agnes due to some good- and bad-natured antagonizing yet there was no foundation for a friendship.
It has always remained a mystery to me why Kim panned out to be the reliable pen pal versus my closer friends along with her disappearance in 1986. As for her gender, it didn’t matter to me. She was compartmentalized in my brain as a friend, contrary to Mom’s “concerns,” there was little to no chance of us ever getting together romantically. This didn’t matter to Mom and thus began my mother’s descent into irrationality about me and the opposite sex; usually her thinking was that I aspired to live out the ridiculous stories in Letters to Penthouse.
Mom’s suspicious mind aside, Kim was allowed to come by the house and we even had an unsupervised trip to White Oaks Mall to socialize; do what teenagers in the Eighties do at the mall, hang out! OMG! Much to Mom’s “disappointment,” I didn’t get her pregnant too! Seriously, we primarily discussed the vapid things our generation was interested in: the new Police album, will MTV ever come to Springfield’s cable system, her current boyfriend, so on. The prurient matters were left to dirty jokes and probably ugly gossip of those we mutually disliked from St. Agnes.
Kim being in Mom’s crosshairs was short lived thanks to another former alumnus who seemed to raise her ire more, Cindy. Surprisingly, I have this girl to indirectly thank for giving me the epiphany I had 25 years ago.
I’m not sure what Cindy ever did that got my mother’s blood up. I’m guessing it was her family if they were bigshots in the parish or Brian’s disputes with Cindy’s brother Andy. As for me, I had a big fat crush on her in eighth grade and it ended in an ugly fashion over Spring Break earlier that year. These days I find this period of my life simultaneously pathetic, comical and educational. If I had only preserved some of it, I could audition for the Austin branch of Mortified.
Anyway, I had no plans nor desire to see Cindy thanks to mixed feelings of disdain and humiliation which teenagers perpetually experience around the clock. Then word got out about her throwing a reunion party at her house. I don’t know if it was coincidence, pity, courtesy, secret attraction or any other factor why Cindy chose the month my family was in the area. I know I had to attend, not to see Cindy but for the chance to catch up with others from St. Agnes. Getting permission was an ordeal with Mom and I feel she eventually capitulated to get me to shut up over her “Playboy After Dark” fears.
Cindy’s party was a harmless affair at her house, even if her parents weren’t home, it’s doubtful it would’ve descended into a John Hughes flick. The realities I perceived in my former classmates were suddenly apparent after being separated from them for a year. High school does start to cull teens a bit by smarts as much as athletics can. I think it was a more dramatic transformation because at St. Agnes, everyone shared the same classroom all day long for eight years until graduation. Some things I saw were more unsettling, namely several of the girls being on the fast track to Pregnant and/or Rehab. One guy’s thing for pot was always rumored, now it was confirmed as true as it had grown out of control. Another guy named Jim didn’t show since the word was he got a girl pregnant. I suppose I never noticed such patterns being amongst them since fifth grade. On the other hand, it wasn’t all gloomy. A guy named Jimmy (not to be confused with the previous impregnator I mentioned earlier), seemed to be doing alright and we had been friends off and on. He was fairly intelligent when he didn’t want to waste his energy on being with the popular douchebags. When he told me he made Griffin’s freshman basketball team, this fact stuck in my craw briefly because I washed out at Strake and if I remained in Springfield, I would’ve made Griffin’s team! Why? He usually fouled out in five minutes back at St. Agnes yet he was on the roster. I could only imagine what I would’ve done. Then I remembered, I didn’t care about playing basketball anymore.
Our conversation about music was always the other watershed moment at this party. My musical tastes had shifted thanks to MTV, KLOL-FM and former Strake peers. So when Jimmy and another guy named Jon mentioned the “big” Triumph-Night Ranger concert, I thought, “that’s soooooo sad” compared to who comes through Houston. Not like my parents had allowed me see anything other than Adam Ant. It was the potential I had in mind. Potential? Well, very little came to Springfield thus most people went to any concert to overcome the dullness and/or they couldn’t afford a trip to Chicago or St. Louis for the better shows. Pretty shallow reasons but read on, it leads to a bigger picture.
Around midnight, the party wound down. Mom picked me up and I’m sure there was some lecturing, especially over the goodbye hug I received from Cindy. Mom had nothing to sweat but I’d have more luck convincing the Iranian government than her. I never saw most of those people again and after some of the things I saw in their characters, I didn’t want to.
Much of the party’s aftermath didn’t sink in immediately, it was a slow burn which probably took a few weeks because I didn’t gain an appreciation and love of my time at Clear Creek High School during the first day of school. The ongoing thought through my mind then was, “moving to Houston proved to be wise. I could’ve remained in Springfield where I would’ve developed my own drug problem to overcome the boredom, tedium and despair.” Not like Dad and Mom would let it happen yet even the most diligent parents can be thwarted. The concert angle also illustrated the mindset of my former school mates. They only liked Ozzy and Triumph because that’s all there was to choose from. In Houston, those performers came too but so did dozens of others from different genres of music, namely my current favorite at the time New Wave. Extrapolate the concert angle to everything else about big-city living choices over Springfield and you’d see what I mean; employment, education, dining, and so on.
Most of this rationalization began to take a more coherent form on the drive back to Houston. Kind of funny too. At the beginning, I couldn’t wait to get there and by the end, I couldn’t see Springfiled in the rear-view mirror soon enough. I still felt a lot of apprehension about the upcoming school year: I hadn’t attended public school since Kindergarten and Catholic schools instill an “us versus them” attitude. However, sophomore year was going to go more smoothly because I discovered how I wasn’t missing out on anything at Griffin, Springfield or their respective “scenes.” On the contrary, I never ever wanted to live any place small again or as I say these days, if a foreign visitor I meet needs directions to find where I live on a map, it’s not a true city. Austin tends to pass this test often enough to meet my requirement.
Hard to believe I have a harmless party to thank for this change of heart. I’m sure my parents appreciated the end of the lamenting over Springfield until two new sources of friction appeared in the Fall of 1983 and then the Winter-Spring of 1984. But we all enjoyed the cease fire for the interim.
Epilogue: A few years ago, Brian told me he encountered Cindy while he attended the University of Illinois. He said she was dating an older frat brother from his house. Brian’s comments about her appearance were very unflattering. I think the adjectives “fat” and “dumpy” were used. By then, any negative associations I had of Cindy were long dead. I was more amazed over the odds of Brian encountering someone we knew from grade school at such a large university.