hometown flashes
When I was a kid growing up in Wareham, Massachusetts we had an after-school hangout at Jay’s Drug Store. It was pretty much a typical drug store/pharmacy place, with the addition of a real long counter fronted by a lot of those stools you could spin around on. I’d say a delicacy for a junior in high school those days was a vanilla coke and a ring ding. The Scottish woman working behind the counter would make sure she got your order right with, “A cake and a coke.” That’s how I remember it.
Out the door and hang a left up the steepness of Center Street, where at the top on the left was the public library. Now it’s up near the town hall. Sometimes a kid named Butchie and I would go there at night, a straight walk down High Street where I lived and he lived just off of, and smoke cherry tobacco in a pipe on the hill out back. I bet the library was lovely, and warm, inside, though I can barely remember.
If you made your way down High Street from there, walking south, you’d come to Tobey Hospital, where I worked part-time after school some of my junior year, and was there the 1965 night of the big east coast blackout. I bought my first car from a guy from New Bedford on the maintainence staff, which is where I worked. It was a 1955 Plymouth, a three-speed on the column, for $150. I drove it three months and abandoned it a Friday night on Route 25 on my way to a high school football game in Middleboro, when the gear shift went all the way around the column – someone said it was a linkage thing. The next day my father and I had it towed to a junk yard in West Wareham.
These snapshots. I was so drunk from drinking a bottle of Tango one night I literally crawled on my hands and knees all the way up Center Street. A kid named Donnie and I fished the heck out of ponds and lakes in West Wareham. I was cheating on a girlfriend at Bourne High School with a transfer to WHS named Amy the Friday night the Plymouth croaked. We were picked up by a guy named Wayne, a year or two older than me, and his date, brought to the game, and then went parking. Wayne, it turns out, was the drummer in the only band I ever belonged – we were The Druids. I was the singer and we practiced most of the time in Wayne’s garage. That’s why they call it garage rock.
I worked in a record store next to an A&P on Main Street for parts of three years – junior and senior in high school, freshman at Cape Cod Community on the weekends. Once, pushing the ’55 Plymouth for all she had, I hit 105 on the speedometer on Route 28, three other goofballs in the car on the way back from a football game in Falmouth. I felt like a big deal that day.
I had a friend named Ricky, not one of the kids in my car that Parnelli Jones day, who liked to say, “Don’t be a gambler, buy a Rambler.” Sometimes I seemed to miss out on the good advice. I think it was after high school when they opened up a pizza place named Minerva on Main Street, about halfway between Jay’s and the record store. Interestingly, Minerva Pizza is mentioned in my about to be published new book – in one of the book’s rare moments of untruth. A final word to the wise – Don’t drink Tango.