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Passed by the old corner the other day. Not a trace of the old gang was left — as if we never existed. Even the ghosts don’t visit anymore. I could still see us standing on the corner with nothing to do, but making it look as if that’s exactly what we wanted to be doing. Nothing.
Like it was cool to do nothing. Hands in pockets. Talking too loud. We sounded like we owned the world when, in truth, nothing was exactly what we owned. Just some change in our pockets. No girls. Girls didn’t hang on street corners in the nifty ’50s. Hell, we could have been monks. Drinking wine out of a paper bag was something the bad kids did, and we weren’t bad kids. Drugs were something Frankie Machine shot up in “The Man with the Golden Arm.” It wasn’t really “Happy Days” either because that didn’t show the loneliness we lived with all the time. Too old to sit in front of the TV with Mom and Dad and too young to know what the future held. The future was as cloudy as the eyes of the old guy who owned the luncheonette.
Suddenly one of the lucky guys who had an old Chevy would utter those magic words: “Let’s take a ride.” Five of us would pile into the small car and ride as far as our collective gas money would take us. Hell, if we were feeling flush, we would ride to the Shore for a cup of coffee. Ride off into the promise of the night.
What was it about the night back then? Why did it set something stirring inside you? The driver, who controlled the music, tuned the radio to WIBG or WFIL. Three notes into a song, the driver would decide that he didn’t like what was playing and press the button for the other station. Chances were he’d hit a commercial and punch the button back again. You could go for miles without hearing a complete song while we screamed from the backseat to let the last song play through. But he wouldn’t. He just kept pressing those damn buttons. Finally, the driver would get lucky. He’d hit a song he liked, and Fats Domino would tell us about “Blueberry Hill” or the Drifters would lament “There Goes My Baby.”
When Snaz drove, and it happened to be a Friday night at 10, he’d find the station that carried the Friday Night Fights. He didn’t care about the fights; he just liked the Gillette theme. And he’d sing along with the opening music: “To look sharp, every time you shave. To feel sharp, and be on the ball. Just be sharp. Use Gillette Blue Blades for the quickest, slickest shave of all.” One of us would shout, “Shut the hell up.” Then we’d scream for Snaz to turn back to WIBG so we could hear Hyski or the The Rockin’ Bird play our music. Inevitably arguments would break out in the car to determine which of us was dumber or whether Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams was the better player. It was the same arguments all the time that were never resolved and only ended when one of the guys would get annoyed and say, “Shut the hell up, youse guys.”
Most of the time we would never get to the Shore — just ride around with the windows down, getting up the courage to whistle at the babes who pretended to be annoyed, but secretly liked the attention. We had lots of courage when we were together, not much when we were alone. We were different people when we were alone.
The thing was the loneliness. We tried but you couldn’t outride the loneliness. It’s true when they say you can be lonely in a crowd, but it was worse when the other guys weren’t around. If we started running on fumes, the driver would stop and collect 50 cents from one of us and get enough gas in the car to get us back to the corner. The brakes were shot on one of the old pieces of crap that Snaz drove. He would practically have to stick his foot outside the door to get it to come to a complete stop.
We knew all along that this night was going to end like all of the rides before it. We never picked up any girls. We hadn’t done much of anything but ride around the same dirty streets we did every other night. We never got that cup of coffee down the Shore. No end point. No goal except to beat down the loneliness for another night, trying to tuck it deep inside ourselves so the other guys wouldn’t see it, but we all knew it was there, gnawing its way through our youth. All of us were playing a role, pretending we were cool when inside we were just lost lonely little boys.
The ride would end abruptly. The driver decided when it would end. The cool night riders would pile out of the car, looking like we had just accomplished something very important. Pretending that we hadn’t just spent another pointless night back where we started. Back on the street corner.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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