So today I talked to my old college friend Allie for 45 minutes on my drive to Dallas. Allie was the girlfriend of my freshman roommate, and we met through him. He ended up dropping out of college for various reasons at semester, but Allie and I remained friends. We haven't spoken since I first moved to Austin almost 7 years ago, but talking to her today, I realize very little has changed.
I actually started laughing to myself in the car thinking about her. We had so many adventures together. She was from Little Rock, so we went back there often to visit her parents and go to punk rock shows at Vino's. I remember being 18 and sitting in her Volvo outside Little Rock's only gay dance club, Discovery, and just wishing so badly that we could go inside but we were underage. We thought about trying to sneak in a few times but we never actually had the guts. And once in the snow, her windshield wiper broke on the way to the Rock, with our friend Jeff, so we stayed in a hotel, only to find out the next morning that it was just a loose screw. We laughed so hard, but had a great time in the hotel room. The 3 of us devised this incredibly elaborate story about being strung-out club kids in this incredibly sordid, bisexual, drug and sex triangle that we were going to try to use to get on Jerry Springer. There were late night "study sessions" at the Waffle House in Fayetteville playing "No Rain" by Blind Melon over and over on the jukebox. Punk shows at the Station, muddy raves out in the woods, skipping Communications class to sit in her dorm room watching reruns of My So-Called Life. Drunken 4-square games at the Greek Theatre in the middle of the night with all of the stinky crusty punk rock vegan hippy weirdo kids from Little Rock, one of which we both wanted so badly, we stayed up many nights with aching hearts discussing him and looking at his pictures.
Yeah, we had many good times. It seems her life has taken some unusual, but fulfilling and wonderful, turns and it was so great talking to her. It seems we can still make each other laugh just as much as we ever could, and she hasn't lost a single shred of her goofiness. So we're going to have breakfast on Friday morning in Little Rock before I leave my brother's house to drive up to Rogers. I can't wait. I anticipate spitting coffee out my nose and laughing so hard my guts hurt. And maybe just for good measure we'll go to Waffle House and listen to "No Rain."
3 comments:
Don't forget the time we were driving to Little Rock and Allie decided to race her Volvo with a Porsche full of guys. And how we spun across the interstate and hit a guardrail head-on at about 90 mph, and then we spun back across the interstate and skidded to a stop on the shoulder. And how the CD player didn't even skip the Pet Shop Boys CD that was playing. I love Volvos... they're like driving a tank.
Yeah, I meant to mention that too, but I forgot. (I was kind of drunk when I was writing this, due to Victor's uber-strong vodka gimlets he made us!) Anyway, that's when I realized I totally loved Volvos.
I actually ran across Allie's work profile when we were looking for houses. Of course, that was 8 months ago, so it's totally possible she's in another line of work by now...
You'll have to tell me how breakfast was!
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