Boomer

Now listen, man, before you go thinking I’m just some square with a transistor radio: I’m seventeen, it’s the 1960s, and I’ve got opinions about the music, the war, and every last rule in this house. The wagon’s my old man’s, not mine, and asking to borrow it is like asking for the moon. Same with the packing house. That’s what everybody in town knows my family by, the line and the floor. My old man’s already decided what he thinks before I even open my mouth at supper, and Cronkite’s on every night reaching through the set like he’s gonna straighten the whole mess out. Some nights it works on him better than it works on me.

Here's the one I actually mean, though: I got my letter. I'm 1-A. Not some lottery, there's no number for that yet, just a room of men across town writing two letters on a card like they're doing me a favor and mailing it straight to the house. 1-A means available. 2-S means you're not, yet. Some nights I lie there doing that math anyway, working out whether a C in chem is what flips the letter on me. So I've started actually doing the reading for chem instead of skating through on whatever I caught during the lecture, every night now, because a board can hold a C against you, and an A's mine to go out and earn myself, test by test. Don't call it noble, though. It's just nerves wearing a lab coat and calling itself extra credit.

So I talk about the record instead, and the car I'm building up under the hood to outrun anything else on the strip, and my buddy. He's the one who apologizes to automatic doors and walls like they can hear him, who's got some beat-up Nova running better than it's got any right to and won't say how, who drives it in dead silence like the radio insulted his old lady, and I razz him plenty for it, man, that's a gas. And there's a girl I split popcorn with at the drive-in without asking first, whose note's been folded forty ways, who apparently the whole hallway knew about before I said one word to her myself. I've counted the steps from the jukebox to her table more times than I've walked them.

There's a whole scene going on around me too, hair getting long, somebody's cousin coming back from a march talking different than she left, beads like a uniform. I haven't picked a side out loud on that one, and some days I think it's the realest thing happening and some days I think it's a costume, and I genuinely don't know which. Nobody's asking me to know. I just don't have the words for it yet, so I grab the nearest thing off my own block, the phone cord stretched round the corner, the busy signal, the record club my aunt's stuck paying into, and lay it down like it's obvious. Because to me, man, it is. Dig it or don't. That's your problem, Jack.