Denny's, 2:15am, Anywhere

The six of us roll in, 2:15 am to a Denny’s anywhere in America, two to a car: me and Lisa in my '69 Chevelle, Jason with Roger shotgun in his '72 Maverick, and Stephanie and Eric in her '78 Mustang. It’s 1980-something, young days of summer and boredom guiding us toward three-dollar breakfasts and bottomless, watery coffee, the lot of us undoubtedly an unwelcome sight for the tired waitress who knows we’ll certainly overstay our welcome and probably won’t have much extra for a tip when we finally roll out around four.

There are these moments, almost always mundane in the grand scheme of things, that somehow nonetheless get snapshot into your brain for decades to come – moments when you can feel the magnetic push and pull of being at once grasping for something greater, more mature, more under your control, while at the same time realizing just how fragile that hold is: you’re still a kid, though playing little by little more at adult games, testing which limits you can push and pry at, what, ultimately if we’re being honest, you can get away with: whether it’s with a girl or the limits of physics in a car with iffy brakes.

Only a few things from those times really lasted: five of us are still friends four decades later, though one died much too soon after that night; a couple of us came close a couple of times to building a serious relationship with one another, but in the end the timing or the distance or the shared goals for the future ended up being too far out of alignment, but probably just as well. 

But here’s the thing: it was very nearly dawn when we walked out, happy in the warm night air and fired up our engines, popped in cassette tapes and dialed the volume up as we drove out into the new morning with the windows rolled down and it was all good, all right -- the weariness and the trek home before full light was just…even and smooth and wordless, wind in our hair, headlights cutting our path home, dropping each other off with a crunch of gravel and a touch or sometime kiss before the last heady mile or two to our parents’ places, cutting our engines halfway down the drive to be able to hopefully sneak in without bothering anyone’s sleep.