answered one of the mysteries of the universe! I felt so cool.
The flames lit the early morning sky. As we rounded the corner the explosions began. Shrapnel from the aerosol cans chased us. Chuck and I took off in opposite directions. I dove under a Buick and watched as the first fire engine arrived. My stomach felt like a ball of glue. I hugged my body to the pavement until I could feel the individual pieces of gravel tattooing the guilt onto my face.
A few porch lights came on, but no one stirred from the nearby houses. The fire was quickly extinguished. And then I wondered: If no one is there to see your antisocially "cool" act, can it really make you cool?
That nagging worry took a different form in high school. Particularly the day a classmate walked up to me in the hall and said, "You think you're so cool, don't you?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"The way you walk, the strut. You think you're so cool."
All I could do was laugh and shake my head. I didn't dare tell the truth, which is that I walk funny when I'm uptight (I spent most of high school in a vise grip.). My body gets stiff, my fists clench, and my elbows try to get as far as possible from the rest of my body. Sort of John Wayne meets Vinnie Barbarino carrying a watermelon under each arm.
Maybe looking cool was enough, I wondered. The question colored my high school friendship with Frank. He thought I was a cigarette-smoking junior hood, a magnet for bad girls. I saw him as a dangerous blond rich kid who drove his massive black Lincoln at Mario Andretti speeds, a tumbler of scotch in one hand and a half-case of Lone Star longnecks iced in the trunk.
After a rain Frank and I would search for the perfect mud puddle and turn his car's exterior solid brown. I was certain the car would flip at any moment and imagined the James Dean-like story in the next day's newspaper ("Cool Kids Die Young, Leave Mangled Corpses"). Fast driving and everything associated with it was the essence of Frank's life, and he swore he wouldn't live past 18. Nonetheless he worried if he'd get accepted to the right fraternity at the University of Texas. Shouldn't he have been making funeral arrangements instead, I mused. Wouldn't that be the truly cool thing to do?
I see now that our friendship was all about being in the presence of greatness. We were rubbing cool off on each other, trying to light sparks within ourselves. We lost touch, and moved on to other role models. Frank is a stockbroker now, and there's certainly nothing cool about that. He's also got a wife and kids. One drunken night years ago, some other old high school buddies and I left one of those city traffic barriers, complete with blinking yellow light, in Frank's front yard in memory of the days of cool. We attached a note, but the see-through paper we wrote it on was from my sister's art pad. The rains came later that night, and I'm certain the message dissolved into mud.
In college, New Wave music was cool and I tried to be too. I can pinpoint the moment I reached my personal pinnacle of cool. My excessively beautiful girlfriend had talked me into growing a beard, but she was the only one who thought the scraggly mass was attractive. I chose the perfect night to nuke it. She and I were going to see the B-52s perform and we went all out. My sister's punky friend outfitted my date in a tight pink outfit that made my eyes bulge. I borrowed some fluorescent orange plastic overalls and shaved parts of the beard away. I left mutton chops and a handlebar mustache and fancied myself a deranged biker. We strutted into the concert, fully immersed in our punk roles. Guys in the crowd ogled my pink date. I sneered and watched them back off in fear. So this is cool, I thought. It seemed so easy, so surface. I decided then that, if cool could be had by designing the perfect look, then it really couldn't be cool. I had answered one of the mysteries of the universe! I felt so cool.
Over the years any coolness I had amassed slowly leaked out. I found myself working as a newspaper reporter in a boring, little Texas city. I wore penny loafers and spent my days listening to politicians talk about themselves. The only excitement came from seeing my out-of-town girlfriend on weekends and taking separate cars to meet my office mate Brad�who led the same life as me, minus the weekend girlfriend�for forgettable movies once a week at a nearly vacant theater. Then one night as the credits rolled, Brad and I walked into a completely deserted lobby. It was almost midnight. By the door loomed a massive coming attractions advertisement for Mobsters, a film about young thugs in the oh-so-cool prohibition days. Life-size cutouts of each of the stars, guns poised for action, were propped on the front of the monstrosity to give it a fake 3D look. I'd had it. This monument to cool was the last straw in my white bread life.
I looked at Brad with my best Charles Manson grin, swiped Christian Slater from his perch, and ran for the parking lot. I bent the ultrathin Jack Nicholson Junior in half, shoved him in my econobox and sped away. My heart beat out a disco song (staying alive, staying alive) as I peered back anxiously at the theater. Did someone see me? Were the cops on my tail? Surely my night in Gardner House or its distant relative had finally come. I trembled uncontrollably.
The telephone was already ringing when I got home. Probably a cop on the night beat asking me to turn myself in. No handcuffs would be necessary for such an embarrassingly petty offense. I picked up the receiver and it was Brad.
"I can't believe you did that." he said and giggled. "That was so cool!"
With a steady molten flow of sweat oozing from my armpits, I laughed knowingly.