The Stony Lonesome: Getting Old

Most of my friends in Fort Bragg are considerably younger than me. This is not necessarily by design, except insofar as my seriously arrested development leads me to seek out others of around my own level of maturity, decidedly not my chronological peers. There are, assuredly, other tweakers in my own advanced demographic, but they are mostly pudding-brained stay-at-homes collecting SSI and broken appliances. I'm more of an action-oriented, go-getting, mission-specific, turbocharged ground-based agent of chaos, constantly on the move and on the lookout for the next score/adventure/conquest/date with destiny, hence my younger, more energetic coterie. That's right, we're a coterie, not a gang or clique or crew or ring. I'm not sure the distinction penetrates the uncomplicated discernment engines of our local law enforcement personnel, but there you have it.

In addition to failing to uphold my end of the social contract and generally behaving as if I were answerable only to myself, one of life's growth indicators I've cheerfully ignored is the conventions of middle age. I've never been able to moderate the unbridled enthusiasm of youth and adopt the gravitas expected of me and my ilk. I give lusty voice to my emotions and freely allow my passions their head. Most importantly, and unfortunately, I almost always agree when someone suggests some ill-advised activity or adventure better suited to the more fleet of foot and rapid of healing, finding myself usually way over my head and ruefully intoning the Murtagh (see: Lethal Weapons I-IV) Mantra: I'm gettin' too old for this shit.

I have a good friend called Naomi who decided to apply her generous gifts of doe-eyed beauty and facile wit to the business of being a baby manufactory and recipient of public funds. No judgment — heaven knows I'm as big a burden on the system as anyone — just saying. When she's not entertaining gentleman callers or undermining the self-confidence of her rivals, I find her a worthy and interesting conversationalist and so spend quite a bit of time in her company, which in time sometimes results in situations like the one described above. Pretty girls are occasionally the nexus of trouble, if not actually trouble incarnate. Not that I'm complaining. I'm sure James Bond is aware on some level of the mischief all those suggestively named vixens have in store for him, but you don't see him exercising any restraint.

I was chilling with Naomi one evening and after receiving a phone call she asked me if I'd like to go to a "tire fire." Tire fire? I thought immediately of Springfield's ever-smoldering rubber conflagration on The Simpsons, symbol of the apathy and decay of the town. Fort Bragg had one too? And it was a destination event? Actually, I wasn't surprised. I once saw a tourist posing in front of a giant pile of fish heads down in the harbor.

"Tire fire?" I asked. "Is that, like, something to do?"

"That's just what we call it when we party out in the woods," she said. "I guess they actually used to soak a big pile of tires in gasoline and light 'em up, but now we just burn wood."

Ah. This practice I was familiar with. Back home in Colorado we called them "woodsys" and from spring thaw till the snow fell you could find them every weekend in the surrounding mountains. What distinguished woodsys from the normal everyday partying we did was their anarchic and therefore inherently unstable and dangerous nature. Parties in the city were held at someone's (parents) house and bound by certain restrictions and conventions, the possibility of police or parents ruining the party always present. But when you traveled 20 miles outside of town up into the mountains, far from any law enforcement or authority figures, with a big fire and a bunch of booze, shit happened and a lot of it wasn't good. There were always fights, the occasional shooting or stabbing, and more than once people wandered off of cliffs in the dark. Someone always crashed on the way home, and I believe that besides one case of leukemia and one football mishap the mortality rate at my high school was directly attributable to woodsys. At the very last one I attended, someone threw a box of rifle bullets into the fire.

"That is fucking it," I said to my friend Jimmy on the way down the pass. "No more. From now on we party in town."

But time has a way of softening the rough edge of memory and whatever caution I learned to exercise back in 1977 failed to assert itself.

"Hell yes I want to go to a tire fire. Let's pick up a bottle of 151, do it up right."

Bacardi 151, for those of you without a death wish, is a mega-proof rum — essentially gasoline — that is responsible for more stupid, violent acts than the Reagan administration and the bottle of choice at 1970s-era Colorado Springs woodsys. In addition to actually freeing the inhibitions and eradicating judgment, just being seen tippling the stuff pretty much gave the imbiber carte blanche to behave however he pleased. "Hey, Dave! Great party, man. Listen, I don't want to alarm you, but Jake took off all his clothes and he's out back trying to hump your dog."

"Yeah, I saw him drinking 151 earlier. It's cool." License to act the fool.

We drove for what seemed like hours down one of those mysterious unmarked inland roads, eventually arriving at a gate put up by Georgia-Pacific to keep people from interfering with their plan to turn all the forests into TV Guides. The gate was sprung and we drove a little further down the logging road until we came to a large clearing filled with vehicles, whooping revelers, and a huge bonfire. I was suddenly struck by a nearly irresistible desire to don a cardigan and find somewhere quiet to sit and muse about bygone days, but I fought it down and took a big slug of 151, ignoring the distress flares fired off by my liver.

There was a knot of cheerful-looking young men by the fire chanting "tire, fire, tire fire," who looked likely enough, so I made my way over to them. "Whatcha got there, old dude?" one of them asked.

"The most celebrated prime number in the history of distilling. One-five-one," I said, passing the bottle to the nearest youth. They all took a healthy pull and followed it with the obligatory "Owooooh! Damn! Sumbitch!" One of them pulled a pistol from his waistband and fired a couple rounds into the air.

"Hey, you guys enjoy that, I'm gonna go mingle," I said.

"WHOooo! TIRE FIRE! OWoooo!" Indeed. Christ, these parties hadn't changed a bit in the intervening 30-odd years. If memory served, sometime in the next half-hour or so some drunk girl was going to make a jealous assumption about the proximity of her boyfriend to another girl. She would fire her beer at him or her, which would miss both of them completely and hit a (for the moment) disinterested bystander, who would say to the intended target, "You need to control your bitch, dude," after which it would be on like Rebecca Sealfon (spelling bee reference). The fight would be broken up but would cause much of the party to split into factions and several ancillary battles would break out. Another girl would lose it and run around screaming and throwing things at people and beseeching everyone to pleeeeeease stop fighting. Before too long, someone would threaten to blow someone's head off and the inevitable transition from party to crime scene would begin. No, thank you. I grabbed a six-pack of PBR from a large washtub full and went to sit in the car. I booted up a soothing playlist on my phone, plugged in the earbuds, and settled in to watch the show through the windshield. There were four fistfights, one female-to-male kick in the groin, three topless girls, and at least ten unscheduled face landings. But no gunplay besides the 151-inspired celebratory shots and no serious injuries. I enjoyed the show immensely from my safe perch in the car and when Naomi returned a couple hours later with her shirt on backward and leaves all over her skirt, I said, "You know what? I really am too old for this shit."

"Of course you are. Hell, I'm too old and you're old enough to be my dad."

"Technically, yes, I was a sexually mature young adult at the time you were conceived, and I probably could've scraped up the 5 bucks for 20 minutes with your mom, but in my defense I'd like to point out that I am very, very immature."

"Got that right."

I have not attended nor felt the urge to attend any tire fires since, and am instead looking, Murtaugh-like, forward to retiring to a boat in Florida unless I am felled by a no-good punk armed-robber's bullet a week before the ceremony. Because, frankly, I am too old for this (prison) shit too. I'm beginning to think that shit of any stripe is an injudicious additive to life and we may all be better off entirely shitless. Here's to a shit-free life, whatever your age.