Two Five Nine: Threads 3

Another loose thread left from stories I've been told over the last few years---

Afterwards, i spent my nights with younger boys, drinking cheap bourbon and listening to loud drum and bass. Younger boys were the cure for the heartbreak caused by the older men in my life. They were wild but easy. We would drive drunk and do burnouts in their crappy cars at Skid Alley, an empty lot in an industrial part of town. We had tactical vomits together in carparks halfway through the night on our way between bars. But we spent most of our time at house parties or at the beach. Bars and clubs didn't give us enough freedom to smoke, for their scuffles, for our endless drinking games. The end goal was always to get as fucked up as possible. The day after our parties we smoked weed and and cuddled under blankets watching 90s kids' films. We would fall into bed together, drunk and high. sometimes we just slept it off, sometimes we would just talk for hours and trade movie quotes back and forth, sometimes we fucked. No matter how we spent the last part of the night, everything would be the same in the morning.

A lovely friend sent me this once upon a time when we were talking about our younger days. Her younger days--- the days she's writing about here ---would've been at the turn of the century, in the very early Noughts. She'd have been sixteen in December of 2001. My own younger days would've been much, much farther into the depths of the Long Ago. Her stories, the stories implicit in the quote, might've been anytime between 2001 and 2005 or 2006. Boys--- "younger boys" ---wouldn't have had cars until 2001 or 2002. She graduated from her posh school in 2003, and the stories might well have gone on through her years at university. I've no idea how easy it was for teens to get into clubs and bars and drink where she lived in those days.

As for my own life, I don't think I went to more than two or three house parties in my high school days, and even at university I never really went out in groups. I wasn't amongst the excluded or ostracized, but I was someone on the edges of groups, someone at a party who was there with a drink in his hand, but not part of conversations. I have never done a "tactical vomit"--- I will note that. Needless to say, I wish I knew more about her stories. I wish she'd given examples of the adventures she had in those days. And I envy her those days with the consuming envy of someone who thinks his own life and past (at least in the days that really count for purposes of stories years later) was never as good as my lovely friend's.