“I could have used you today.” I told them what my job had been. “I threw up twice and nearly passed out.”
“Our esteemed editor in chief, jumping in pools fully dressed and throwing up on the job,” Mif said.
“I got to piss.” Cap shoved open the back door.
“You think?” Billy said. “Your back teeth must be floating.”
“Damn it,” Mif said. “Now I got to piss. I told you not to talk about it.”
I reached for the door handle, but Billy stopped me. “You’ve only had one beer.”
“You’re telling me I can’t pee?”
“Come on, man, don’t leave me here alone. People will think I’m beating off to Peter Sellers.”
I laughed and shut the door. Billy and I could hear Ed singing Serra fight songs outside the car. Billy looked out his window and laughed. I looked over. Ed was doing push-ups in the parking lot.
“Great,” I said. “That shouldn’t attract any attention.”
An explosion echoed on the pavement. “M-80,” Billy said. “A quarter of a stick of dynamite.” Smoke filtered between two rows of cars to our left. Overhead, five or six bottle rockets exploded, leaving red-and-white trails before snapping and popping near the movie screen. Horns honked.
“When does Santa Clara start?” I asked Billy.
“Orientation is late August.”
“You get a roommate yet?”
“Nah. Later in the summer.”
I envied my friends going off to college, even if they were not traveling very far. I envied them having just a single roommate. I had shared a room big enough for two with three of my brothers—until my parents added on a family room at the back of the house and turned the downstairs room into a bedroom. I got it after my three older sisters and John moved on to college.
“My brother John had a roommate at Davis who became catatonic and cut off his hand,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“Swear to God.”
“He cut off his hand? That’s impossible. He’d pass out before he finished.”
“No. He put it on a train track.”
“Oh shit.”
“I know. Right? At least my brother had a room to himself for half the year.”
“And nightmares,” Billy said.
Ed sang the “Padre Whisper,” a fight song that culminated in his spelling out “P-A-D-R-E-S” at the top of his lungs. Our friends in the two adjacent cars were now sufficiently inebriated to join in the chorus. People yelled at them to shut up, which only caused our friends to yell louder. More bottle rockets went off over cars and another M-80 exploded nearby. I had experienced this too many times to not know how it was going to end.
Car doors flew open and grown men stepped from their cars. I couldn’t blame them, but in a pack about to get in a fight, you take on a pack mentality.
“Just once I’d like to actually see the movie,” I said and pushed open the door.
“This movie sucks anyway,” Billy said. “At least this will be entertaining.”
The unwritten code mandated you didn’t stay in your car when your buddies got in a fight. You backed them up. That was easier for Cap and Mif, who had played football and were well over six feet and more than two hundred pounds. Mif had stunned the Serra weight room that year by being the first student to bench press more than three hundred pounds. Neither of them, however, was anywhere near the car at the moment, and Billy and I were no match for the four lumberjacks coming down the aisle.
Ed sang, largely ignoring the approaching platoon. Mickey Giusti, who had driven the second car, and Pat O’Flynn, who didn’t care if the Forty-Niners’ offensive line approached, always welcomed a fight.
It started with the usual. “You’re a bunch of punks.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
And it escalated from there.
Ed still looked largely disinterested. He laughed and continued to sing Serra fight songs, which elicited the obvious and unimaginative refrains from our enemies that we were all homos and faggots. Big mistake. Nothing was more sacred at an all-male high school than loyalty to one’s school and protecting one’s sexuality.
Punches flew.
The fight became a brawl.
Billy and I largely stayed on the periphery, out of the melee, while trying to look like we were in the thick of the battle. This was an art form we had learned over four years. The goal was not to get punched in the face and get your nose broken, or lose a tooth, but to become disheveled enough to make the others believe you were in the fight.