"One Perfect Day"

"One Perfect Day"

An actual happy high school memory.

As usual I woke up long before my wife, shuffled off into the kitchen, started the coffee, fed the cat, filled the dog's bowls with Kibbles 'N Bits and water, then opened the front door to greet the day and check on the garden. At 7am in Tucson, early August, the air is warm and still. Birds chirp and flutter by. A light cool breeze blows in letting us know that autumn is coming and the heavy days of the desert summer heat are waning. A perfect day, I thought.

This got me thinking about all the days that pass us by. Being human, we all experience those days that just arrive, do their job and leave without much thought going into it. Then there are those that just don't fit right. Much like putting on wet jeans that are 2 sizes too small, these days annoy, chaff, linger too long and generally piss you off making you wonder “Why the heck did I put these jeans on in the first place?” Replace jeans with “day”...metaphors, I know. Pompous.

But then, gosh darn it, there are some days that just exude sweetness and light. Those days where the jeans are clean, fit perfectly and make the world take note and say “Wow...lookin' good kid!” OK, enough with the jeans thing. I don't even like wearing jeans. I'm more of a baggy shorts kinda guy. Not the silly dumpers that hang past your rumpus and dangle precariously close to the ground usually donned by mentally challenged wannabe gang kids from the suburbs. No. Just past the knee, comfy Dickies that let the world know I am not only a man of leisure but can participate in either Hip Hop or Heavy Metal forays in need be. Universalism is important to me regarding trousers.

You know what I mean though, right? Those rare and wonderful “perfect days”. Breakfast is good, weather is fine, no lines at the bank or Disneyland, found a 20 dollar bill in your pocket you didn't think was there, work or school closed because the day is too awesome, it's your birthday and Van Halen reunited to play your party...stuff like that.

When the kettle whistled and I poured the coffee grounds into the press pot, I started to think about my perfect days. There are a lot. But one, for some reason, stuck in my mind as being the one really great memory of my high school years. High school for me meant very little except getting bad grades, getting teased, going to an institution that shunned the arts and the general zits and outs of what is supposed to be “the best time of my life”. For sensi-boy bookworm D&D and Heavy Metal nerds like myself, those 3 ½ years were hell. I graduated early thanks to a suggestion of my English teacher. Thanks Ms. Favalora!

As I plunged the coffee down before tipping it and the steaming hot coffee into my mug (with a little low fat milk, thanks) a smile came over my face. That one memory started to come back in a wild haze and in the fog of years gone by, I began to recount the steps that lead up to my one perfect day in high school.

OK...here goes.

Let's go back shall we? I'm thinking 1986 or 87. My dad and I were living in Salinas, a mid sized township in central California, about 400 miles North of LA, 200 miles South of San Francisco and just a few miles inland from Carmel and Monterey. We lived in a moderate apartment with a garden, just a few steps away from a Senor Taco (which had the best burgers, go figure), the Northridge Shopping Mall and a sweet drainage ditch we all used to skate called “Iceplant”, because, yes, it was surrounded by iceplants. Clever huh?

Like I mentioned before, it was one of those miracle days. Temperature maybe in the high 70s, marshmallow clouds swam in a lake blue Kool Aid sky and there was virtually no wind. Excellent day to do some serious skateboarding. Now, I was never very good at skateboarding; too clumsy and too afraid of getting seriously hurt I reckon. But my love of it, the scene, my friends and all the trappings kept me firmly planted on a board at any given time. So after my dad dropped me off at the front entrance of my school, North Salinas High, I met up with my friends who were already skating next to the parking lot, doing railslides and grinds and complaining that we all had to sit inside on such a beautiful day.

As the first bell rang and my buddies packed it up and made their way into the dank interior of that building, my friend Geordie made a genius suggestion.

“Let's get out of here,” he said with a wily grin. “I mean, how can we be expected to go to school on a day such as this?”

Geordie and I met a year earlier and had become good friends pretty quickly. Our love of skating, bad movies, getting into trouble and being too smart to be put down by such a place as North High, gave us an instant bond. So after taking in all considerations and realizing that the pros way out voted the cons, I smiled and nodded and off we went.

The two of us skated all the way from the high school, down the main road, found some interesting embankments and curbs, over to the mall where we continued to skate before heading in to get us an Orange Julius.

“Hey, you kids can't bring those things in here!”

It was a security guard. Some overweight oaf in a blue shirt carrying a walkie-talkie protested us carrying our boards though the mall. We told him we do it all the time and we promise not to smash anything. He wasn't convinced. So we assured the guy we'd go away and never to return with skateboards in hand. That seemed to satisfy him. Once he was out of the picture, we giggled and made our way to the Orange Julius stand.

After said nectar of the gods was purchased and consumed, Geordie and I then went into International Imports, a place in the mall that sold strange items from across the globe (which honestly looked more like they fell off of some truck) and had this back area with all sorts of cool things. Beyond the bongs and sexy games and toys, there was a plethora of heavy metal and punk tee shirts and tomes of posters depicting bikini clad girls and rock bands. As we flipped through images of busty girls holding beer bottles or sitting on sports cars, New Kids On The Block and ones with cartoonish snakes and dragons that would give any male bedroom that element of “intimidation”, we realized that we were indoors on such a splendid day.

“Yeah but, North High doesn't have girls running around that look like that!” I noted. Still, once the sweat had dried and we were refreshed from the Orange Julius, we lit out in search of more post school cutting skate adventures.

That lasted for about another hour. By noon we were spent and just wanted to hang out until our friends were released at 3pm. So we headed back to my place and chilled out planning our perfect ditch day.

At this stage of his career, Geordie was a serious “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” fanatic. That movie spoke to him much like a flaming bush upon the holy mountain. Not only did he empathize and identify with the character, but Geordie started to dress like Ferris as well. He had a beret, sweater vest and same sunglasses as depicted in the movie. It was pretty cool. Strange, but cool.

That John Hughes flick also spawned an obsession with The Beatles. It was the weirdest phenomenon. One night I went to bed and woke up the next day a Beatles maniac. Geordie concurred thanks to Ferris dancing to “Twist and Shout” on that parade float. In the throes of listening to very little else besides hardcore punk and thrash metal, The Beatles snuck in and took hold of me. Luckily, my dad had every album they ever released (up to that point) in the US, so we always had hours of fab four fun at our disposal.

“I got an idea,” Geordie said. “Lets rent 'Hard Days Night' and 'Help'.”

Sure. Why not? What little cash we had between us could indeed be spent on renting two awesome movies featuring our favorite non-punk/metal band. So we gathered our stuff and prepared to skate down to the corner video store.

“But wait,” I interrupted, “I'm starving.”

“Yeah. Me too,” Geordie said.

Were we really going to spend the last of our meager pocket change on renting two movies we had seen a million times? Apparently so. A quick check of the fridge indicated a lot of stuff that had to be “cooked” or “prepared”. Screw that noise! We just ditched school to have a leisurely day off to enjoy and exploit the angelhood of our adolescence; doing anything beside skate and slack was off the books. Cooking was the last thing on our agenda.

“Wait a minute!”, I interjected as Geordie considered eating a Swanson Salisbury Steak frozen dinner. “I have an idea!”

My dad, who was still doing local theater at the time, had befriended a guy that owned a small chain of family style seafood restaurants called Skipper's. Skipper's was no more than fried fish bits served up with fried shoestring potatoes and coleslaw that was pretty pricy for the quality of stuff you got. The Skipper's owner had given my dad two “Free Complete Dinner” coupons a while ago during a wrap party for some show they were both involved in.

After going into my dad's bedroom and finding the coupons in his stack of business cards and receipts, I returned to show Geordie our solution to the stomach growlies.

“Thing is,” I started, “I think he's saving these for something.”

“How long have they been there?” Geordie asked.

“I dunno. Year or so.”

Geordie just laughed. “Yeah, he forgot about them. He was saving them for this day. C'mon. Let's go grub!”

We exited the apartment, slammed our boards down and skated to the video store. After trying to sneak into the “adult” section of the place, before being caught by the middle aged lady behind the counter, we darted into the “musicals” area, grabbed the movies and returned to check them out.

“You two don't look eighteen,” she said sternly.

“We're not,” I said.

“We just like sex,” Geordie continued, “and would like to see it on the TV.”

She rang up the movies, we paid then left to skate the few blocks to get to our nearest Skipper's, which was maybe five blocks from the apartment.

Around noontime, Skipper's was booming. Lunching folk craving overpriced deep fried cod and halibut lined up and waited patiently. We didn't care. We took to practicing our ollies while we slowly made our way to the order window, sending loud and echoing “Clack...Blams!” throughout the crowded restaurant.

“Hey! You kids stop that!” cried out what looked like a manager. All day old people were trying to ruin our “Geordie and Mark's Day Off” merrymaking. But we didn't care. When we presented those two coupons to the tired looking girl at the order counter, who literally rolled her eyes at us, we knew that the rest of the afternoon would be spent in Beatles and free fish heaven.

After a while the food arrived in large to-go bags. I am not kidding you, each bag, each dinner, weighed about 5 pounds. Our teenage and penniless eyes grew so wide, all we could do was laugh and skeedadle out of that place pronto for fear of them saying we got the wrong order, that we got the dinner for twenty...and hand over two small buckets of fried sadness.

It took a while to make it back to our apartment, but when we did, we quickly opened the bags and started organizing the ominous lot of food on the area in front of the TV. It was more than a smorgasbord, it was a spread that would make any heathenish Roman run for the vomitorium several times.

“Holy crap,” I said. “That's a lot of food.”

“Whatever!” Geordie cried. “Let's go!”

So after pouring some sodas and grabbing a whole roll of paper towels, I slid in 'Hard Days Night', turned up the stereo and soon we were rocking out to the movie and rocking even harder with our free fried fish fiesta. Our faces literally glistened from the amount of grease we were taking in, as if I needed more zits at that time.

When 'Hard Days Night' ended, I threw on 'Help!' and by the end of that movie, we had eaten every last bite of those two dinners.

“I...(burp)...can't believe we ate the whole thing,” I warbled, half dead in a food coma.

“That was awesome,” Geordie said. “Hey! Look at the time!”

The clock read a little past 3pm. We quickly cleaned up the to-go containers and sloppy plate mess, made sure no crumbs were to be found, shoved the trash into a brown paper shopping bag, grabbed the two movies and headed out. We tossed the incriminating evidence of gluttony into the large dumpster out front, returned the movies to the video store and skated off to the 7-11 near our high school to meet up with our pals that had just gotten out of school.

“You guys ditched,” some of them said when we arrived. “What'd you do?”

“Oh...not much.”

With that the lot of us rolled off and skated in the setting sun until it was time to go home for dinner.

Before we parted, Geordie and I shook hands.

“Good job buddy,” he said. “Fantastic ditch day.”

“Same to you,” I nodded. “Let's do this again shall we?”

He then made the long trek back to his home and I wheeled down the street, up to the apartment and entered to find my dad cooking dinner.

“There you are,” he said stirring something in a pot, the smell of meatloaf filling the air. “Hungry?”

“Sorry. Just been skating with the guys. Um...sure,” I uttered trying to convince myself.

Just then the phone rang. As my dad was busy cooking, I picked it up.

“Hello?”

On the other end came a voice. It was a recorded message from our school principal:

“Hello. This message is to inform you that your son or daughter has missed one or more of their classes today. Please contact us if...”

I had gotten the message before. It was when I was deathly sick with the flu and had to miss about a week of school. That was the time when the Space Shuttle blew up. I actually saw it live as I laid on the couch half conscious from a fever not knowing I had been witness to history and true horror. In my illness, I thought I was watching a bad episode of 'Battlestar Galactica'.

Luckily for me I had great improv skills thanks to some theater training. As the message wore on, I kept saying “Hello?...Hello?” before shrugging and hanging up.

“Who was that?” my dad asked.

“I don't know. They didn't say. Wrong number I guess.”

Whew! I dodged that bullet. After cleaning up, I sat at the table and was served a heaping pile of meat, potatoes and salad. The lingering effects of that fish holocaust was still rumbling in my gut.

“Thanks dad. Looks good.”

My dad sat down, took a sip of wine and asked, “So, how was your day?”

As I played with oven baked meat drenched in ketchup, all I could muster was “Eh. It was alright,” knowing darn well I had the best day ever.

That night as I lay in bed, staring up at my Metallica poster, still reeling from the food and aching from the never ending skateboarding activity, all I could do was smile and sigh. It wasn't a huge day, it definitely wasn't the craziest day filled with wild and near illegal adventures, but it was a day just being a teenage goofball and not being stuck, yet again, behind some desk, listening to old crusters drone about boring crap, staring out the window wishing that I was out in that beautiful promise. That day, with my good friend, I actually was.

And, during my time in high school, it was never to repeat like that ever again, even though I cut school quite often. Not that I'm encouraging cutting classes or ditching responsibilities, but sometimes, when life gives you days such as that one, you just gotta do the right thing and take it all in.

Just don't eat a complete dinner for two from Skipper's all by yourself if you have the chance. Because that was just gross.