End Of An Era

One summer, Billy and I were out riding dirt bikes all over the Great Falls, Montana area. We were friends, part of a family-style unit that hovered somewhere between being a gang and a cult, consisting of a rather fluid, more-or-less military-related membership of about ten or twelve people (males and females) plus whoever they were currently banging or attempting to bang. We even called this collection "The Family" when we thought about it one way or the other; when someone once pointed out that it had already been done, we decided that Charlie Manson could just kiss our ass if he didn't like us usurping "his" thing.

The Family always hung out together, drank together, fought together, sometimes fought WITH each other, bailed each other out of jail, and frequently worshiped together, which worship consisted of spending upwards of 48 hours in a row in near-trance, grass-and-whiskey-fueled "Spades" tournaments over at Charter Members Ted and Sandy's house.

 

Back to the motorcycles...For a variety of reasons, we knew this was going to be our last time out and about, and we were taking advantage of the hot summer day. Theoretically, I was going to be back in a year or so, and we made plans to continue our lives just like we always had. But we knew that the military, doing the stuff that the military does, combined with real life, doing the stuff that real life does, would probably have a say, and it was very likely that we'd never see each other again, never mind take up where we'd left off. Life just doesn't work like that, and even at that early age, we knew it; I was leaving The Family, and would never be able to find my way back through the labyrinth of time and life I was about to enter. It's a one-way path, you can never go home, and all that.

At any rate, squeezing the last drops out of this last day before the paths of our lives forked and I stepped into uncharted territory, we roared around the hills and plains, pretending it would last forever. We came up over a hill, our bikes winding out and stuttering. Down in the valley below us we saw a large crowd of people and equipment and lighting and camera gear, all doing STUFF. We shut down our bikes for awhile and watched. We knew Eastwood was in town filming some movie, but didn't know much else about it. This was the only run-in we had with their crew. They shortly did something that clearly indicated that they were taking a break, so we fired up the bikes and went away.

When we got back to Billy's house (a mobile home,) we had a couple of beers. He excused himself and went to the bathroom, leaving me in the living room with Kristy, his wife. She was crying, had been all that day every time she saw me. She was so pregnant that she could barely walk. She came over to me, hugged me and kissed me, and stroked my hair, and cried against my chest, and I kissed the tears from her eyes, and she said she loved me.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I should probably explain. Billy's Kristy was a smokin' hot little Florida sugar-beach blonde. He brought her at 17 into The Family from one of his leaves back home, marrying without so much as a by-your-leave. For some reason or another Kristy and I "clicked" almost instantly. She thought I was just cooler than a bag of ice. She was young, and just didn't know any better, I expect. We began flirting some months later and flirted, not very seriously, for months afterward. We were on a sandy riverbank one afternoon, and I was laying on a beach towel next to her drying after a swm. She'd taken the top off her bikini for even-tan purposes (it wasn't common, but most of the women in The Family were generally not very bashful about that sort of thing. Most of the men didn't pay much attention. I can't explain it. You had to be there.)

Billy had run off on one of the bikes and was tearing up a hillside about 1/2 mile away. Kristy and I were talking about nothing in particular - and out of the blue, I asked her what she would think of it if I were to hit on her seriously. She rolled up on her elbows, her face inches from mine, blue eyes serious as a heart attack, and replied, "I've been kind of curious about that myself..." and then rolled back over to work on her tan, and took up our previous conversation without missing a beat. She was...well, she was something. We finally actually got naked with intent (which memory is making me smile even as I write this,) but at the last possible minute remembered that (a) she was married, which in those days didn't matter much to me, (b) to a good friend of mine, which did and (c) more importantly to someone who trusted me, which was a deal-killer.

So, no, we weren't having an affair, and as an incidental matter, that night ranks up there in the top ten of the weirdest I've ever had, and I've had some. But she was generally well-disposed toward me anyhow, thus the tears and whatnot.

And then I hugged her again, hugged Billy and walked out the door, and that life ended.

I had one other run-in with the movie crew while I was on my honeymoon the following month - the brand-new Beneficiary and I stayed at the Heritage Inn in Great Falls as we passed through - I'd gotten orders for another tour in Southeast Asia, and in ten days would be on an airplane headed out. We were in town to introduce her to some of my people (including Billy and Kristy,) and go on up to Glacier/Waterton Park and do the tourist thing, and like that before the long year of separation began. 

We never saw Eastwood or any other recognizable people that we know of, although at that particular time, we were pretty much engaged in trying to jam the beginnings of a life and a new world into a pitiful few days, and probably wouldn't have noticed if we'd run over him in the hallway. The Hollywood weirdness was just background noise.

Skip ahead a year. Maybe two.

Billy went PCS (Permanent Change of Station) before I got back to The World from Southeast Asia, gone to Mississippi where I'd first met him. The Family, as expected, had dissolved, with some remnants hanging about like poorly remembered dream fragments. The Beneficiary and I and our new son didn't play Spades. Our new family was a different thing, a more important thing. But I always missed the old days, the old crew, the smoky whiskey nights and the long talks and drama and games.

We stayed in sporadic contact, of course, Billy and I. And one day we were on the phone lining up a visit we figured probably wouldn't happen between us all to take place on the Gulf Coast. He asked if I'd ever seen the movie we'd seen them filming that last day down in the valley below us. I hadn't. He told me I needed to see it when I could find it. There wasn't much in the way of DVDs or even VCRs in those days.

And when I did see it, I laughed. Then forgot about it. I've seen it several times since, and it always makes me laugh.

Tonight I was putzing around on a guy's blog. He's kind of an acquired taste, but if you're into that sort of thing, he's at http://marktwaincubed.blogspot.com/. While there, I ran across a poster for the movie:

...and I was again reminded. At one point in the movie, Eastwood and the crew are having a dramatic moment out in the country. As they pause, in the background you can hear two motorcycles sputtering, and as the camera pulls back - there we are, Bill and I, on my last day with The Family, up on the hill, watching the filming. Apparently, we were too minor a background annoyance to make it worth a reshoot.

And maybe it's just being reminded about this on New Year's Eve, when taking stock and looking back and seeing markers in time that divide past from future are up front in my mind, but when I saw that poster and remembered the movie, I could suddenly smell the dust and prairie and wheat fields and smoke-filled warmth on winter nights as The Family played, and the time that we went to the Holiday Mall parking lot in packed cars to race and see who could pull the most donuts on the ice and packed snow before slamming to a stop against piled drifts and lazy afternoons drifting on tubes down a creek and nights around a campfire in deep forest in the Belt Mountains after hours of singing horrible songs and getting drunk in a bar that no one else knew about. And Kristy, pregnant and crying, and the taste of salt on that last day...

Kristy had a stroke a few years back. She's a lot better now. She says she still loves me. We talk sometimes, Billy and Kristy and I. Billy and Kristy are the only couple we know who have been married longer than we have. I think Billy knows about Kristy and me, what little there is to know - but we're still friends, and I don't think he really minds too much. They live in Alabama now.

Sandy is gone, lost to drugs and alcohol somewhere in Georgia, if she's still alive. Ted had a traffic accident, which didn't hurt him, really. But when they were x-raying and prodding him to find out whether he was hurt, they found the shadow spreading across his pancreas. He was gone in a flash. Carol had a heart attack in Oregon, and Gene went overseas and got busted importing heroin from the Golden Triangle. He was never able to get his feet back under him after doing five years on McNeil Island, and finally killed himself in LA. The rest are just missing, gone in the river of time.

And tonight, for a bit they're all back, and we are together again, all of us and all our time, in those vanishing few seconds of flickering history on the screen. Is nostalgia supposed to make your eyes water?

Back to real life next year.

In about two minutes.

In Our Next Episode:The redhead I wasn't in a mood to include here.