On trashing friends' backyards...

With apologies, this is a shameless repost of a short story I wrote about five years ago. The contents herein are all true, of course-they took place at Jeff's house on New Year's Eve of 1999. Not that I didn't have other ideas for my weekly blog; I just felt like blowing the dust off this one.

It’s 1:00 in the morning on New Year’s Day and Jeff is jumping. An appropriately titled tune by Van Halen is blasting out of the speakers on the wonderful old console stereo, and from time to time Jeff launches himself free of the world for a split-second or two. Only once does the CD skip when he lands. Culley and Carey are over in the corner trying party hats on various and sundry of each other’s respective anatomies. Dani is unsuccessfully trying to engage Jeff and Kurtis in conversation over Eddie’s screaming guitar, and I am fuzzily trying to decipher The Book of Lists. No one knows where Pat is.

There’s something running through my mind like a three-legged gerbil. It’s lopsided and grotesque, but intriguing in an elusive sort of way, all the same. It’s got to do with past New Year’s Eve parties—a videotape—wild laughter—damn. It squirrels its way through my mental grasp once again.

I am standing now, and I mean to walk into the living room and exchange The Book of Lists for We Interrupt this Broadcast when I notice that the music has changed. It’s not Van Halen anymore, not even close. It’s really familiar, but I just can’t place it. Fuck, am I that drunk? I know this tune…ah yes. It’s Roger Waters and his pros and cons.

"…and Cadillac limousines and the company of has-beens…"

…Cadillacs…

…a V-8 screaming in harmony with someone’s wild cackling laughter…

…a house flashing past on the TV screen in a lit-window blur…

Click.

I find my way over to Culley and Carey.

"Hey, Mike."

"Whutchoo want?"

"Didn’t you tell me something about Jeff going out in his backyard and doing donuts on New Year’s Eve a few years back?

"Yeah, we watched the videotape."

"Do you…er, d’you think he might be up for it again?"

"Fuck if I know. Why don’t you ask him?"

I decide, in a fit of drunken half-logic, to do just that. As the words pour out of my mouth, while I listen impotently to myself, I notice Culley weave his way over, his eyes, still at half-mast, lighting up with a yellowish, booze-induced glow. I guess I must look just like that.

Jeff, as gracious a host as ever got spanked by the doctor, agrees with an air of nonchalance. "Sure," he says. "Just be careful."

Oh, but we will, won’t we? Course we will.

I fumble my keys out of my pocket, and realize they are not the keys to my rice-grinding pansy-mobile Acura affectionately known as the Blue Banana, but to my mother’s brand-new Jeep Cherokee complete with a 4-liter straight-six that would just about pull a house, shift-on-the-fly full-time four-wheel-drive, and a perfectly acceptable 6-speaker stereo with six-disc CD changer.

Dr. Jekyll, sitting astride the left hemisphere of my cerebral cortex, lets out a wail of dismay and pounds his fists ineffectually into the convoluted surface.

Mr. Hyde only grins a grin filled with picket-fence teeth.

Culley and I are staggering toward our respective mounts when Pat (ah, there he is) crashes out through the screen door behind us. He begs us to tell him what we are doing. We do. He ejaculates verbally, and starts running. We figure he wishes to join us, but—well, Culley has a truck. I have—for the time being, anyway-this embodiment of road-rage on wheels. Pat is running toward…oh, dear God. A 1998 Mercury Tracer rent-a-wreck.

It’s front-wheel-drive.

It’s a four-cylinder.

It’s a four-door.

It’s pink, for Christ’s sake.

Oh well. Culley sprints lopsidedly for his Toyota and I fold myself laboriously into the cramped (for me, anyway) cockpit of the Jeep. It fires up with a smooth yet torquey-sounding purr. I load a Susan Tedeschi disc into the changer and pull the transfer-case lever back towards me. A small light appears on the dashboard, indicating that the full-time four-wheel-drive is herewith engaged.

It is January, yet so far there has been no snow. We have agreed to stay cool and off the gas until we get to the track portion of Jeff’s backyard, but Culley goes careening around the corner of Jeff’s house with the back end of his truck somewhere in the next zip code, rear wheels effectively skinning the lawn down to the frozen top-soil. I, of course, immediately follow suit, but my attempt to boot the rear end out with a poke of the throttle only tosses me back in my seat as the Jeep lurches forward. Of course you can’t hang it out in four-wheel-drive, you dolt, I think. I slide the lever forward, and the little light goes out. Ah, now this is much better. I skate around the house to the back yard with the peppery echo of turf bouncing off the fenderwells in accompaniment.

Culley threads his way through the trees onto the track, now obscured by pasty-yellow prairie grass that, in life, stayed admirably out of the way of highballing dirt bikes and Honda Odysseys. Now, in death, it exacts it revenge by completely obliterating the track surface. No matter. Culley pounds all 160 horsepower right through the floorboards, and his truck pirouettes beautifully across the track’s infield, the front and rear wheels—the ones I can see, anyway—pogoing frantically up and down over the tussocks.

I find that the experience is all the more rewarding if I simply leave the transfer case in two-wheel-drive. Things are much more exciting this way; I traipse gaily over the dead foliage, the Jeep rarely pointing in the direction it is traveling. The heater is blasting and Susan Tedeschi is bellowing and the world is just fine as paint. A track on the CD finishes, and, just before the next begins, I hear a sound over the sonorous grunt of the engine that is sufficiently strange to make me punch the ‘stop’ button.

Yes, there it is again. A high-pitched buzz that rises and falls, rises and falls. It’s behind me, so in booze-induced paranoia I stomp on the gas again and shoot off across the field. I pause after awhile; the sound is still there, only now it is accompanied by bright lights that wash across my rearview mirrors periodically, leaving my vision swathed in fuschia.

I finally get up the balls to stop, get out and look. It’s a pink bubble, floating in a bouncy sort of way across the grass. Like the Jeep and Culley’s truck, its trajectory rarely matches the direction in which its headlights point. It lacks a certain grace, though, somehow; its rear end comes out, snaps back into line, comes out, snaps back into line. I figure there’s some serious handbrake-yankin’ going on in there. The engine is constantly screaming, and every once in a while it does a complete one-eighty, throwing up grass in large divots from its madly-spinning front wheels.

It’s Pat. He sees me and stops, frantically rolls down the window. Across his moon face is plastered what seems to me to be the largest grin I have ever seen.

"Man, what the fuck?" I ask him, laughing. "What are you doing to this poor thing?"

"It’s a rental," he replies. That’s all he needs to know, and all I need to hear. I sprint back towards the idling Jeep as Pat throws the Mercury into another series of wild handbrake-induced loops.

I’m back in the Jeep, now. Susan is belting out "Friar’s Point" as I make my way all the way down to the very rearmost of Jeff’s enormous yard. A brisk stab of the go-pedal and the Jeep is pointing back towards the house. I steer into it, the rear end hooks up and away I go. The ride is rough, but not too bad, and I see the speedometer briefly touch thirty. All of a sudden the ride becomes smooth as butter, and I look down to see both the tach and speedometer needles go streaking towards the redline. Like Jeff, I have managed to leave the earth behind for just a little while. I circle around and do it again, and again, and again…and, like Jeff, only once does the CD skip when I land.

Crashing back to earth for the fourth time—or is it the fortieth?—I see a bright flash of light from the large picture window at the back of Jeff’s house. Instead of tossing the Jeep into another sprint-car-inspired left-hander, I continue on into the backyard proper. It is Kurtis, who is taking pictures. Immediately my brain screams "PHOTO OP!" How cool that must be—I’ll go flying up toward the house, and I’ll yank the parking brake and go slewing wildly toward the window. Kurtis will have some awesome footage.

Here I go—I accelerate toward the house. The Jeep vaults over the lip separating the track from—God help me—the lawn. I see the volleyball net flash by on the left. I cannot make out the individual squares in the net, so I must really be hauling. Here’s the tree; I aim the Jeep at a point three inches to the right of the tree and pull up on the handbrake. The Jeep swings into a lurid slide towards the house. I think it’s pretty close to full-on broadside, but then I think I could do better. The camera flashes into my peripheral vision as I release the parking brake with a snap and let some more ponies out of the corral. The brake-induced slide turns into power oversteer, and I go back out underneath the tree and past the net into the track’s infield, where Culley is doing a long, slow donut while simultaneously leaning his head out the window to watch himself.

I get out and swagger over, timing the truck’s oscillations and stepping inside the loop. Third Eye Blind is pounding out of the cab. Culley sees me and stops, turns the music down.

"Man, Kurtis is takin’ snappy-snaps," I crow.

"Of what?" Culley demands.

I proceed to demonstrate. As I come around and head back towards the track, I see Culley’s red Toyota come hurtling toward the house. And…yes, here is that bulbous little pink thing, its engine a cacophonous wail. Culley pelts toward the house, but pulls the handbrake a little too late, and does not follow it up with a liberal application of throttle. He obliterates the fire pit. Pat spins the front wheels splendidly; the front end of the car washes out and goes skimming towards the patio. He cuts the power just in time to avoid plastering the barbecue.

Now this is a party. We loop madly around the lawn, throwing in variations occasionally. I come heading straight for the house if full attack mode, intending to step on the brakes at the last minute in a spectacular show of…well, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be cool. I forget the Jeep has no ABS, however, and I slide grandly toward the window, all four wheels hopelessly locked. The Jeep comes to a stop a foot or two from the house. Kurtis snaps furiously away from behind the window. Jeff is next to him, and from the look on his face, he is either shocked, laughing hysterically, or super-pissed.

The flashing red-and-blues from across the way give us pause. We all converge in the center of the lawn and erupt from our respective vehicles. I am laughing, Culley is laughing. Pat looks worried.

"I think those cops over there are for us," he says, jerking a nervous thumb towards the back of the yard at the cop parked next to the house behind Jeff’s. The officer is out of his car and looking at us; as Pat says this last, he leaps into the idling cruiser. Even above the tortuous racket Pat’s car is now making, we can hear roar of the police car’s engine, and we know the officer tarries not along the way.

"Okay, we better cool it," I say sagely. "Let’s get these things back out in front of Jeff’s house before the cops get here. That way they’ll never know which cars were back here."

We pile in and go back around the front. I am behind Culley; he snaps the headlights off and flings himself from his truck as I pull up behind him. I am getting out of the Jeep just as Pat’s abused Mercury limps out from behind the house, its engine sounding like an electric mixer—and just as two police cars converge on Jeff’s house. One of them courses in from across the street to block the driveway, as though to prevent our escape; its nose dips violently toward the pavement in the officer’s haste to bring us to bear.

Pat parks his car where it is and kills the motor. He walks up as the cops are beginning the Riot Act.

"Are you guys driving around in this guy’s backyard?" one asks, his tone incredulous.

I look at Culley. He looks at me. We both look at Pat.

"Well," Culley says, "we were just moving some cars around to save some space."

The officer is nonplussed. "So you—all three of you—decide to do some donuts while you’re ‘moving cars.’ How long were you out there?"

We exchange glances. None of us answer.

The other officer speaks up. He asks the question that, had we been any less twisted, would have known our actions would have forced him to ask. "How much have you guys had to drink tonight?"

The lie springs to my lips and is spoken before I can catch it. It is of course a blatant lie, and the officers both know it, and I know they know it, but I cannot help it.

"Er…nothing?" My voice rises on the last syllable, as if I were asking a question. I have just signed our death warrants.

At precisely that instant Jeff comes hurtling out his front door and down the driveway. Before he has even gotten off the porch he is shouting at the cops. "This is my house! Mine! I told them they could! Private property! They’re fine!"

He continues on in a similar fashion until he reaches the group. He and the officers engage in conversation, most of which I cannot hear as I have my head buried in my hands. But Jeff is as savvy as he is courteous and generous, and finally the cops head toward their cars, after admonishing us and telling us to sleep here tonight. Most of us do…except me, who leaves in search of an all-night Do-It-Yourself car wash open on New Year’s Eve wherein I can wash Jeff’s lawn off my mother’s car.