Summer 1991

We were going 120 up I-5 through the Central Valley and I was beginning to get worried about my hair. There were four of us in the little Golf GTI, it was about 95 out, and the car had no air conditioning. We had rolled down the windows to deal with the heat, and even though I had my waist-length hair in a ponytail, it was beginning to turn into an impenetrable rats' nest I was afraid I'd never be able to untangle. The Ventures were blasting the Hawaii Five-O theme song out of the stereo for the thousandth time, and the wind was roaring through the car.

We were heading home from San Francisco. We'd been down there to see the first Lollapalooza. The drive down from Portland had been long and exhausting, and one of us had not exactly been forthcoming with her parents about what she was doing over the weekend, so we had to get her home no later than 10. Another friend, who was terrifying behind the wheel, had promised to get us there in time if the other three of us watched for cops on the drive. The fourth person in the car was its owner, and she was game.

It seemed beyond the powers of reason that we'd be able to see cops with radar guns in time, especially given that we were squinting heavily against the rush of the wind, but sure enough, we saw two patrol cars on overpasses far off in the distance and slowed down in plenty of time. My friend drove like a suicidal meth head (which, at some time in the past, he'd more or less been), but he was blithely self-confident and very, very lucky. The Ventures faded into the Dead Kennedys faded into the Crucifucks, and sometime around dusk we crossed the Oregon border and started looking for dinner.

It had been an epic weekend, full of partying, music, loads of freaks, and shopping. We were still buzzing, both from the high of a weekend perfectly executed, and also nervousness at our headlong pace up I-5. Now our friend the driver told us he knew of a good Thai restaurant in Grants Pass, and we took the exit and drove through town. We were dubious about finding food in Southern Oregon that wasn't horrible, but our friend's strange luck held, and we pulled into the parking lot of a tiny, homey restaurant with a red-painted wood facade and wholesome American decorations.

The food was amazing and we were starving, so dinner was over almost before it started. It seemed odd that the four of us, two boys and two girls, could be sitting so companionably around a table with no romantic entanglements or tension, but reassuring at the same time. Not everything could be reduced to a simple calculus of desire and negotiation, at least not at that time or place. We'd all been friends since high school, but we'd bonded for the weekend into something more meaningful, if not durable. We'd all done a bunch of stuff we weren't supposed to be doing, and it felt good.

It was getting dark when we hit the road again, and we were running late. I mumbled something about being hauled off to jail for reckless endangerment as we hit the freeway, but my friend just laughed and pulled into the left lane. He was pushing the as hard as the car would go, and we were all getting a little nervous. Traffic was heavier than it had been, and he frequently had to flash the brights at cars obdurately parked in the left lane as we'd zoom up behind them at close to twice their speed, impatiently riding their bumpers until they pulled over into the right lane.

By the time we hauled through Salem, the car was silent with barely-suppressed tension. I think the driver sensed that, and also figured that his luck was bound to run out in the heavily-populated corridor between Salem and Portland, because he finally pulled the speed down to a relatively reasonable 80. I was worried about being ridiculed by my father if we got hauled off to jail, the car's owner was worrying about her poor baby, and the other girl was worrying about whether her lies would be plausible enough for her authoritarian, protective mother. The windows had been rolled up, the stereo turned off, and the car glided through the glossy suburban dark. It had been a fun weekend, but it was over.