It's 9AM
He asked me to a Kansas concert in Anaheim.
I was young and had a weekend pass.
A couple of days free from obligation and responsibility and only one instruction.
Do not go to jail.
A nice way to say stay out of a fight.
Besides, I was too young to get into a bar.
Legally.
Old enough to get in trouble, but I had almost a decade of experience of that by the time I ended up in California.
Just outside of Oceanside there was a waterpark and I liked to park at the end of the wave pool for a popular pastime anytime I had a free weekend.
Watching bikini tops drop when the surf splashed across the strings.
I know, I know, it’s childish, but in my defense, I was barely past being a child myself.
And boobs.
I mean, if ever there were a couple of reasons for a man to feel a little rowdy.
A fascination that haunts me to this day.
He was a manager of the water park of some sort, and a Mormon and friendly.
Probably pretty good at his job because he recognized me after a few visits, though that wasn’t too special.
I watched him recognize a lot of people, and greet them, and spring for Coke’s and the occasional meal.
Just doing good manager stuff.
After a few visits, he noticed I showed up by myself a lot.
My companions were older and had a preference for crossing down to TJ to catch shows or trouble or the clap.
I didn’t join them because of different plans and agendas and listening to advice of men far wiser than me.
Their warnings included staying closer to where we were in southern CA and most important of all, staying out of trouble.
Trouble was a big all encompassing word that was never defined but implied a lot.
A LOT.
So I stayed out of trouble and out of TJ and in a waterpark and sometimes on the sand by the pier watching surfers curl the waves in a town named so aptly it boggled the mind.
The manager noticed I spent a lot of time in the company of myself, and mentioned it in passing.
He may also have noticed my attention to the waves and the women bouncing in them.
So when he asked if I liked music, what was a young man to say?
Of course I like music.
He had tickets to a Kansas concert and invited me to go.
I only knew he was asking me on a date a few years later.
Because
Back in Arkansas, I had a best friend in high school and I went to a couple of concerts with him.
It wasn’t a date.
Hell, my first concert ever was with my Step Mom catching Styx in Barton Coliseum when my Dad bailed to stay in OK on an off week from the oil fields.
We watched Mr. Roboto in an interactive movie that blended into a stage performance, and I learned later in life that it was a version of a rock opera.
My stepmom cried, and I didn’t know why at the time. I thought it was because of the traffic leaving the venue.
It was really because her and my Dad’s “troubles.”
It wasn’t a date.
Which did not play in my mind when I agreed to just hang out with some dude in SoCal way back in the early 90’s.
It was a more innocent time and I was a more innocent dude and hadn’t spent any time outside of American borders yet.
So I said yes, and watched Dust in the Wind on a rotating state after he picked me up and dropped me off.
It was only years later in the retelling of it that someone suggested it was a date.
I said he didn’t try anything.
They said yeah, but have you ever been on a date and figured out it was going nowhere before?
Which I had.
Several times.
And I had been on several dates since then, a much older and more jaded version of twenty year old me, who knew that nothing was going nowhere and still tried to see what was under the bikini because-
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But he didn’t venture, which I’m glad, and I gained an experience watching a rotunda stage host a band from my youth and every now and then, when the song pops up on Pandora, I get a rush of the lights, the thrum of the sound and the sound of carrying on like a wayward son.
He was Mormon, so maybe he was just being nice.
Maybe he wanted to see if I had siblings for sister wives.
Maybe he just wanted a friend.
We could all use a few more of those.
Want to be my friend? write me: Chrislowrybooks@gmail.com
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