Astroworld

It was a hot and humid Sunday in late July. I spent the day at Astroworld with Mike, his date and my girlfriend. I had been working at my job, that Mike helped me get, at the grocery store for about six weeks. And since this was a Sunday, the store was closed and I could do something like go to Astroworld. 

We had to get his date home early, before dark as I remember. The remaining three of us went to the Pizza Hut way out on North Shepherd Drive. A pizza place was a new thing then and this one was brand new, even the doormat looked new. Mike wanted pizza with everything on it and that meant onions and peppers which made me sick to my stomach. That my girlfriend wanted what he wanted made me more sick to my stomach. 

The pizza took a long time and it was getting dark. My driver license was for daytime driving only (or to perform duties of my job) and I knew I’d be in trouble with my grandmother for being out after dark. But Mike kept directing what we did and my girlfriend was delighted to go along with Mike’s ideas and I was too embarrassed to say what I needed.

I felt so sick to my stomach with inadequacy, pizza, and Mike, that I went outside to the car to get some fresh air. The pizza place was so far north and close to the city limit that the lot next to it was vacant with high grass, the kind like in my yard that if I chewed some it calmed my stomach. The dogs did that and it worked for them, why not me? I sat on the hood of my grandmother’s 1959 Rambler station wagon and chewed a piece of the grass. It did its magic. 

It was already night time yet very bright out with a full moon. The moon shadows were stark. I remember gazing up at that moon wishing I was somewhere else. I was wishing I was someone else, and thinking about the Man in the Moon and wondering what it would be like to be him or at least meet him.

As the nausea settled down, I decided to explore the vacant lot. It turned out to be kind of sandy, which was odd I thought, with patches of the grass I was chewing on. There were a couple of sheets of weathered plywood laying in one spot. I thought about how another friend of mine and I used to go looking for grass snakes. A piece of weathered plywood was perfect snake habitat. But ever since one time I had come across a baby copperhead, I lost my interest in capturing snakes and graduated into fearing them. I decided against any further investigation.

By the time I went back inside, they were done with the pizza and having a marvelous time talking. It was as though they hadn’t noticed I was gone. I had another coke and tried to join the conversation. All I could see was the moonlight shining on my girlfriend’s face, at least I thought that was what it was.

We finally left and took my girlfriend home first, then it was Mike’s turn. I was still so annoyed that he had gotten more attention than I did. All the way to his house I thought about how hurt I was but more about how mad I was. The Man in the Moon would not have put up with this, I thought.

I pulled the car into the driveway at the end of the dead-end street where he lived. He paused to get out for some reason. And for some other reason, I blurted out that I was mad at him for flirting with her so much. It was the first time in our friendship where I expressed any real feelings that I had toward him. He just smiled and said “Ok”. He got out of the car and went inside.

I was a little stunned by my expression of a feeling and felt kind of light-headed as I drove home.

Of course, my grandmother greeted me with the disapproval I expected for being home so late after dark and being gone all day and all that stuff about my being only 15 with a special driver license and her worry and so on. Even so the disapproval was brief and not as intense as I had imagined it would be.

She had been able to keep herself distracted from as much worry because she was very intently watching the TV news coverage of the moon landing and man’s first step on the moon.