This had *never* happened in all the time we'd been working with Connie and Barbara down in their beautiful city of Asheville, North Carolina. I would always end up riding home with Connie or Barbara, and usually with my dad as well.
Not that night. That night, all seventeen years of me got to ride, all by myself, with Gray.
Since this was so important to me at the time, you are probably thinking Gray (Not His Real Name) was teh hott. To me he was, but not in the way you're picturing. For that, you would have to turn to Alec (Not His Either), a member of our merry band who was in the full flower of his Polynesian-Chinese young manhood. That boy stopped traffic. Martina Navratilova woulda took a second look. And my heart did flutter when, one day, he condescended to talk with me for a while. But in the end, Alec was just a kid my age.
Gray...was a man.
If you insist, you may call him an aging hippie. He had a beard. His hair had formed itself into white-man dreds--not actual locks, but sections of hair that had become permanently fused in little rivers or snakes that streamed down from the fishing hat he always wore. He had broad, strong, useful hands which were ragged and fascinating from some kind of condition where they were always peeling. (He would bite a loose end and tear off a whole strip with his teeth.) His voice was gristle and bone. And he had stories to tell, of a somewhat different kind than his friends.
(As you've probably guessed, I had no time for pretty. In seventh grade, I sat on my grandmother's floor and stared in awe at a harsh, brutal picture of John Belushi in all his fatness, stubble, despair, UNIQUENESS, POWER, and INTELLIGENCE. I stand with the Cocteau Belle: "Ma bete! Ma bete! Donne-moi ma bete!")
Gray was a "bete" to beat 'em all. He was an electrician. He was a machinist. He built houses. He was recording all the sound for our project. He'd taught his dogs their commands in Chinese. He visited old people in the neighborhood just so that they wouldn't be alone. He'd demonstrated and marched and seen the not-softer side of the police. As shy, withdrawn, and angry as I was, I forgot it all when I thought of Gray.
Now, tonight, finally, his car was the only one with room for me. A tiny victory of chance that no one but I would ever know I'd won.
There is nothing quite like riding in the southern dark with your secret crush.
Why is it I've always felt so free in the South? Gray in Carolina. Skyroad silver in Florida, a storm smudging the highway into the clouds. Mr. Silence coming out of himself in Atlanta, sitting down at a piano in the mall and singing from his heart. That was when I knew that it was going to be for always.
Gray in Carolina, one last time.
