The summer sergeant Hamilton loaned me his black 1980 Camaro Berlinetta.  The heatwave that wouldn’t break. When I washed dishes at Phelan’s and you washed dishes at the new Friendly’s by the mall. Staring down August and what was next. Smoking too much of Joe, Jr.’s weed. September like it would never come I’d pick you up after work and we’d drive around with the windows down, smelling of food and god knows what else. The muggy air blowing our hair around and the sweat drying on our skin. That moon rising big and bright over our suburban town, which we loved to hate. And that last night before I had to give the Berlinetta back to Sarge. I didn’t want that night to end. And I wanted you to feel that way too.

The same summer my father finally found a job. Started getting out of bed in the morning, showering and putting on a suit again. When it felt like things might be falling back into place for me. But your father was caught sleeping with some other family’s mother.  And your sister got pregnant and took off. And because shit got bad at home, you took to sleeping at my place. 

The crazy summer of eighty-five with Tears for Fears all over the radio and Live Aid on the tv. When Freddy Mercury showed us he was king of the world. When Sarge gave me his Camaro to look after while he was in Greece and we both couldn’t believe it. When he dropped the keys into my hands at the airport and boarded that plane, and I wondered what the hell I did to deserve such luck, but I didn’t question it either. Drove out of there with those planes lifting off, the roar of those big engines overhead, and went straight to pick you up.

The summer I worked three jobs if you count selling Joe Tracey, Jr’s weed to the Phelan’s kitchen staff. When I cut that acre of perfect grass for those rich people out on Riverview Road who had a pond and a fountain and a refrigerator in their garage filled with Orange Crush and Miller High Life. When I worked for Joe Tracey, Sr., giving away fool’s gold jewelry at car dealerships around town. He would run an ad in the paper, lure customers in for a test-drive. Get your free necklace! A $50 value! Saturday only! And we’d greet them at the door, the two of us wearing these scratchy, polyester tuxedos and glossy, slip-on shoes with white socks, and break the news that the jewelry only comes after the test drive. 

Joe Tracey, who said he could “sell snow to an Eskimo in winter.” Who said he could “always stay one step ahead of the creditors.” Always looking for the next hustle. His liver riddled with cancer although we didn’t know that yet. The summer I had some money in my pocket for the first time and thought maybe I’d be able to bring some of it to college with me, if that’s what I actually could afford to do. 

Those days were long and the sun was impossibly white in that impossibly blue sky, and then red like liquid fire at night that made everything glow and look beautiful. Watching the light change like that I could feel the blood going in my veins. Like the air in my lungs was magic. Like whatever was happening in the moment was enough. When nothing felt very real, except for the Berlinetta, which was temporary, ephemeral, a fantasy. But you and I would drive that thing around our town like it was ours and we were something, the moon up there and the music on the tape deck. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Raspberry Beret. The Boys of Summer.

And that last night before I had to bring it back. Before Sarge was flying back to the states, and I would meet him at the same airport and hand him back the keys. All of it still in my mind, even now. Where we went. What we did. How I felt and what you said to me. And I wonder where you are now and if you recall all of it too. 

Sergeant Hamilton’s Camaro Berlinetta. A two-door, fastback coupe with a 6.2 liter v-8 and pristine black carpeted interior and crispy analog display. Blood red Camaro badge on the steering wheel and a silver Berlinetta badge in magnificent cursive on the angular grill. No dome hood, just clean, pure lines. Built in Norwood, Ohio before they closed the plant down in ‘87 and threw the whole town out of work.

Did I ever tell you about Sarge? Did I tell you about the man himself? I don’t know if I told you any of this. I should have, if I didn’t, because he was good to me for no reason, and I wish I knew where he was today, too.

Sarge taught Military Science at my high school, La Salle Institute. That all-boys, Catholic, military prep school located at the outer edges of Troy, New York, a forlorn mill town where the Hudson meets the Mohawk. He was born and raised in South Carolina. Enlisted in the Army at seventeen and retired from active duty after twenty years as a First Sergeant. Then over to La Salle for a gig he thought would be fun, even though some of us gave him a real hard time, which wasn’t fair or right, on account of his southern drawl and his slight frame and his tendency to get worked up real easy. 

Thin and wiry, maybe five-eight, his hair always kept high and tight. He chain-smoked Marlboros and drank coffee all day out of white Styrofoam cups. Laughed easily just like you, but then could stare a scary hole into your soul with these dark, expressionless eyes. Something for effect I guessed he’d learned from a drill sergeant or company commander somewhere. 

When he asked me to take care of his Berlinetta, when he said, “Would you look after it for me,” I couldn’t say yes fast enough. “Just keep air in the tires, wash it once a week. Change the oil in July.” Joo-lie, he said. “That’s an order.” He didn’t want to leave it in the parking lot of his apartment complex unattended all summer. He said he knew I could handle the job. He said I was a rule follower and a good kid and straight as an arrow, honest as the day is long.

“Yes, Sir,” I said, and saluted him. “Roger that.”

And I thought of you, how you would love it, and how it might cheer you up and would give us some hope for the last ragged days we had together, before everything became smoke and ash, the stuff at the back of the beyond of our past experience. 

So we drove the Berlinetta everywhere that summer. Always with the windows down.  The crickets and cicadas buzzing and singing in the grass along the shoulders when we took the rural county roads.

That last night. You wanted to go to the ’76 Diner after work. So we pulled into the parking lot and went inside and sat in the air conditioning and ordered food, smoked cigarettes, drank bad coffee and played the tableside jukebox. You remember that? We smelled like garbage, kitchen fumes, food scraps. You remember the cute waitress? How she wanted nothing to do with us until she saw you go back out to the Berlinetta for more cigarettes? When you came back in it was, Is that your car? I get off work in an hour. I have a friend.

“That’s what’s wrong with girls, right there,” you said, staring after her while she sauntered back to the kitchen. I remember she looked over her shoulder and smiled at you like I would smile at you. Like everyone smiled at you. “Let’s get out of here.”

So I went out to the car and pulled it around back like you said, and idled there a while near the dumpster with the headlights off listening to that engine purr like a big cat until you came crawling head first out of the men’s room window. And when you slid into the Berlinetta and closed the door laughing, you said “Go,” and I backed up and then gunned it onto Route 9 and turned the headlights on and you settled into the seat and eventually looked over at me and said, “She deserved that. Don’t feel bad. I know you feel bad.” I didn’t say anything back because I did feel bad, and you knew it, but I didn’t want to ruin the night and then you said, “Let’s try the harness track. I feel lucky.”

One of the things I wanted to tell you that night was that not all girls were like that. That we could find girls that didn’t care about what ride you had. Who didn’t sleep around. Who wouldn’t go home with just anyone. Not like the woman who took up with your father. I wanted to tell you that we should just enjoy this last night with the Berlinetta. But by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the track a cloud formed again and the scowl came back, and I knew you were probably thinking of your mom and all the shit she had to deal with. 

At the track there were the usual degenerates, which is what we felt like walking around in our dirty dishwasher clothes. I told you that the scene and characters there reminded me of a Bukowski poem, and you said you didn’t know who or what that was, and I said I would loan you The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, and you looked back at me like I was the weirdo I was. You might have even said, “You’re a weirdo.”

We bought programs and a couple of beers in those plastic cups and sat in the bleacher seats under the big lights that made our skin look waxy and marked up the lineups with the stubby pencils they give you without saying anything, deep in thought, analyzing the horses and the jockeys like we could decode the universe and reel in some magic. Then we went to the counter and waited in line with the other dregs, shifting from one foot to the other, staring at our programs, finishing our beers, making changes, thinking about luck and hitting it big. And we bet and of course lost a couple races, watching it all unfold on the grainy monitors in the clubhouse and then went down to the track and stood at the fence and heckled the loser jockeys we bet on as they walked the runway to the paddock, laughing at ourselves when they gave us the finger.

Then we went back to the bleachers and smoked and drank a couple more beers, laid back in the stands and stretched out our legs like we were sunbathing, and watched the losers and alcoholics and drug addicts lose their races too, and we told each other we wouldn’t end up like that, although we knew it was an easy thing to do but didn’t say that out loud. 

Instead, we talked about college, which was right around the corner, and felt like someone else’s idea. Someone else’s promise of something better. “When everyone is doing this one thing over here, that’s your que to head the other fucking way,” you said. And after a while I said you were right, but we were probably going anyway, and you laughed.  “Yeah, probably,” you said.

“Sergeant Hamilton told me I was made for the Army. Said I should go ROTC or something. Thinks I’m made for it.”

“And?”

“I asked my dad. He enlisted after he failed out of Union. ‘Over my dead body,’” he said.

“So? Over his dead body?” But I didn’t know how to answer that and then after some time you said, “I don’t know who to listen to anymore.” And then you got up and said you had a feeling about the seventh. A horse from Connecticut named Mad Crazy Love.  27-1. And you wanted to go big, and you talked me into using Joe Jr.’s money from the weed I sold to the waitstaff and kitchen crew earlier that night at Phelan’s. “Let’s go big,” you kept saying.  “C’mon, what would this guy Bukowski do?” 

I said I thought Bukowski would probably go for it, but he was a drunk and an addict and a poet, and you laughed. And then I pointed out that I had to give Joe, Jr. his money the next day or, fuck, that would be bad. But you said a horse with a name like that was a sure thing and did I have balls or was I a loser like these guys walking around who let chances like this pass them by and doesn’t go for it? “Every once in a while you have to go for it,” you said. 

            On the way home, a car was coming in the opposite direction with its bright lights on.  What time was it? I flashed my high beams but nothing. Then a second time, but he wouldn’t turn them off. You remember this, I know.

            “What’s this guy’s problem?”

            “Fucker won’t turn them off,” I said, and then I veered the Berlinetta into his lane and drove straight at him, clicked on my high beams.

            “Oh shit,” you said, when the red and blue flashers came on. 

            It was three in the morning. We were on one of those dark county roads. The cicadas and crickets had shut up for the night. There was a new chill in the air and it signaled summer ending. You turned the music off on the tape deck. I don’t remember what was playing.

I pulled the car back into the right lane as the cruiser approached from the opposite direction, lights flashing, and you expected me to slow down but I punched it, and we blew past the cruiser, and it braked hard and we could hear the tires screech as the cruiser spun around and I watched in the rear view as it drove over the shoulder and went down into the ditch a little but came out of it right fast to chase after us, spitting gravel and dirt and grass and shit visible in the glow of its lights. 

“Fuckhead, what are you doing?” You were sitting up, eyes wide, looking out the rear window. Suddenly, you weren’t so tough. “Going for it,” I said. You sounded scared. And it was something I won’t forget. That moment. You being scared. Showing that finally. “Pull the fuck over,” you said. “Seriously.”

I thought about what was under the hood of Sergeant Hamilton’s Camaro Berlinetta. You could hear it. Feel it. All that horsepower. I knew that moment, that opportunity would never come again. And I could feel the Berlinetta speed up like it was someone else driving. Like I was outside of myself hovering above it all, like someone else was driving. Except it was me driving.  And you were by my side.

“What about going for it?” I said over the engine and the rush of the air through the windows. “Let’s go for it. Let’s really fucking go for it.”

“Asshole, pull over.” I could feel you looking at me while I watched the road, with the cruiser closing behind us. Scared. Could feel your heart pounding, blood racing.

“No. Let’s go for it.” But then you grabbed the steering wheel and the cruiser was on us, lights flashing, so bright in the rearview, and I finally pulled us over, in the dark, under the stars.  I turned off the engine. And we sat there.

“Holy shit,” you said. “Holy fucking shit.” Empty fields were on either side of us. You were breathing heavily and holding onto the door bracing yourself.  We were stopped just before an intersection with country roads that ran off somewhere into the dark.  There was no one else around. No other cars passing and the two troopers got out of the cruiser and came up on either side of Sergeant Hamilton’s Camaro Berlinetta and you started to say something through the open window to the trooper on your side, something like “We’re really sorry,” when both doors opened, and it was amazing, really amazing, how fast they had us out of the car. I was spun around and pinned to the hood, and it was hot like a hot frying pan on my face and arms despite the new, chilly air, and the trooper pushed down hard on my neck and kicked my legs apart and patted me down hard, saying Don’t move, don’t move, spread ‘em, keep your hands where I can see them.

Then he grabbed my wrists and brought my hands around to my back, and I felt the handcuffs go on. and he told me not to move again. and I could just see out of the corner of my eye the trooper that handcuffed you pull you up and take you out of my sight somewhere. And I’ll never forget that look on your face. Because just before you disappeared we looked at one another and I knew then that you were scared but I wasn’t and that was the difference.

The cruiser’s headlights illuminated a few hundred feet of the road ahead like a tunnel through the black that disappeared into nothing, and I looked out there but there wasn’t anything to see so then I stared up at the tiny stars, the moon, listening to the two troopers rummage through the car, the glove box, the back seat. They talked to each other in this back and forth, a call and response: I have the insurance and registration. I have his wallet. This one says he tried to stop him. FUBAR, Trooper Clark, FUBAR. Copy that. Vehicle is registered to a Richard Hamilton. U.S. Army retired. Say again, Trooper Clark. Hamilton, Trooper Eastman. Sergeant Rick Hamilton. Copy that. Let me see those docs.

Then after a while I was pulled off the hood, and the trooper stood me up and walked me out in front of the Berlinetta to stand in front of the lights that were shining down the road into nothing, and he looked me hard in the eye like Sarge would, inches from my face and said, “This is funny?” And he waited like Sarge would. A long, pregnant pause.

“No Sir.” 

“I have a family. A wife, a son. You drove right at me.”

“That was a mistake, Sir.”

“A mistake? You accelerated. You’re a La Salle Cadet?”

“Yes, Sir. Just graduated.”

“Just graduated. Why do you smell so bad?”

“I just got out of work, sir.”

“You just got out of work.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“You did not just get out of work, did you, son. Want to try that again?”

“No, Sir. I did not just get out of work.”

“Where are you coming from? How do you know Sergeant Hamilton?”

“The harness track. He teaches at La Salle. He asked me to look after his car while he’s away in Greece this summer.”

“Is that right. And this is what you call looking after his car? Who’s the Commandant of Cadets at La Salle?

“That would be Lieutenant Colonel Reese, Sir.”

“And how about the rifle team?”

“That would be Master Sergeant Dowgos.” 

“Fuck me,” he said, sucking his teeth, and backing away. “Rangers?”

“Master Sergeant Brown.”

There was another long pause and he stepped back even further, hands on his hips and looked off down the empty road like he was waiting for something or someone to come and tell him what to do. Then back at me, jaw clenched, and then eventually he shook his head, and I knew better than to look directly at him, so I just kept my eyes straight and stood at attention while he walked in a little circle with the light from the headlamps illuminating his gray trousers with the black piping, and his black shiny boots. 

Then he took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair and looked out into the darkness of the vacant adjacent field, put his hat back on carefully with two hands, and walked back over to where I was still standing at attention. “Well, Jesus fucking Christ, son,” he said, spinning me around to remove the cuffs. “This is your lucky day.”

One night at Phelan’s, the sink backed up and I didn’t know it but a drinking glass had broken at the bottom of the big metal basin and I put my hand into the dirty water to push the clog away. Shards got sucked through my fingers. I pulled my hand out and blood ran down my arm. Two of my fingers and the thumb were shredded around the fingertips. 

The boss told me to take the night off, and I wrapped my hand in a dish towel and duct-taped it like a giant oven mitt to make sure none of the blood could go anywhere and drove with my bandaged hand hanging outside Sergeant Hamilton’s Camaro. By the time I reached you the towels were soaked through, and you put me in the passenger’s seat, and I hung my hand out the other window. You got us back to my place. That was the only time I let you drive the Berlinetta.

You brought me into the house and cleaned up my fingers and got me some of my dad’s Wild Turkey. Then with my mom’s black needle and thread, you sewed it all shut, telling me not to look, not to be a baby, and this was better than sitting in the emergency room all night waiting for nothing. After, you doused it with peroxide and bandaged my fingers up again and we burned some of Joe, Jr.’s weed I didn’t get a chance to sell to the kitchen crew that night. Eventually I thanked you, and you just shook your head smiling at me like it was nothing but what I was thinking was that I couldn’t remember the feeling I had at that moment ever before. And I wanted to tell you about it but wouldn’t have found the words anyway. It wasn’t something I really understood.

You don’t know this part. The next day. After they let us go, we got back in the Berlinetta and you told me to drive you home, that it was time you went back and faced your parents and got your shit together because you were leaving in ten days for college, and you couldn’t keep staying at my place like it was your house. I said that was probably right, but I didn’t want you to go because I knew that was the end of things. Things we would never talk about. 

I drove you home, and we sat in your driveway, and I waited for something. But you just said it was one hell of a summer, and it was one hell of a night, and now we were going to grow up. We had to get our shit together. And maybe you’d read this guy Bukowski’s poems one day.  But I said no, don’t do that, because Bukowski didn’t have his shit together, which I learned later on, years later, after I did some more living and had my heart broken, and lost at more things, that I was wrong. He did have his shit together. And then you got out of the Berlinetta, and I watched you go up the walk under that weird light from the late summer, early morning moon, and take the key from under the mat on the front step of your house and unlock your front door and disappear inside. And I knew that was it. 

I went home and crawled into my bed and woke with the sun coming through the dusty windows of the barn, which sat at the back of my parents’ yard. That’s where we slept when you stayed with me. Mattresses on the floor. Remember that? Alone back there in that barn all summer? It was afternoon when I woke up and I stared at your empty bed. Sheets in a tangled ball where you left them. My ribs and side where the trooper hit me was sore, bruising blue. Still sick to my stomach from the kidney punch he left me with, which you said was better than what you thought they were going to do with us, and I knew you were right. But I managed to get myself down the barn steps and into the house, where I showered and dressed, and then I brought the Berlinetta to the carwash before I had to meet Sergeant Hamilton at the airport and give him back his keys. 

But first I had to meet Joe, Jr. at Denny’s where he had his usual booth in back. His office, he called it. I had to give him his cash. I was short a few hundred, and short his weed that we smoked, and believe me I thought about what I could do to solve that problem, but nothing came to me except the same thing we did with the troopers the night before. And so I just drove to the Denny’s and there he was, as usual, smoking cigarettes and piling them up in a black plastic ashtray, taking and receiving orders with that stupid pager. And when I told him I was short, he screwed up his face and didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time, and then finally he said he was going to tell his father to dock my pay for the next car scam job. I   thought about that, and I thought about leaving for college, and I guess I laughed a little, which made him angry, but then I told him I was done with the car scam job and fuck that tuxedo, I wasn’t doing that crap anymore. I told him I liked his father, but I didn’t really like him, and what was he, twenty-five? Twenty-six? What the hell was he doing with his life? He wasn’t too old to join the army. “Probably would make you a better person,” I said. “You should think about it.”

“Are you trying to get yourself fucking killed?” he said, and I gave him the cash that was left, dropped the money we didn’t blow at the track on the table with the ashtray and the food crumbs and the dried coffee rings. 

“I put the rest on a horse I thought couldn’t lose. But it did,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders. “I’ll try and pay you back,” I said, looking around. “Before I leave.” And then I turned and walked back toward the glass doors of Denny’s, past the rows of tables where people were eating their eggs and sausages and English muffins and drinking their coffees and smoking their cigarettes and not talking to each other, and I could feel him behind me, following. I knew what was probably next, but I didn’t care or even think about it. If anything, I thought, just like I did the night before, that it’s going to be what it’s going to be, and I caused this and that’s the important point. To know that. To accept it. To know you caused it, and so you deal with it. That’s how you get rid of the fear, I thought, walking out through the glass doors and into the sun.  

And when I got to the Berlinetta, which was shining bright black and beautiful because I just had it washed, I turned and sure enough he was right there, and I just stood and let him slug me in the face. 

When I heard you were gone, a dark hole opened. And I knew it would never close. Like a phantom limb feeling. A haunting. We’d grown distant. Talking every once in a while. But the closeness, a familiar ease and comfort always remained when I heard your voice on the other end of the line.

When I got the news, memories of that other summer, when we were a bit older, came flooding back. When you went searching for your mom in the Adirondack foothills. Up some abandoned logging road, after police search parties couldn’t even locate her.

It was like you had a sense. You knew where she was, where she’d driven herself and why she was there. People called it a miracle. That you found her. That she was still alive. The pills. The razor and the plastic tube. 

But I knew it was something else. That there wasn’t another soul in the universe besides you that could have found her. Like a beacon. A sentinel. And when you came back, sunburned from being out all day, dehydrated and spent, legs and arms cut up from bushwhacking through bramble and brush, you came to my place and we put our arms around one another and you cried into my chest, and that was the last time I touched you.