Moon Over Nebraska

Take a ride with me to the year 1974. I hope to take you on a trip back in time. Please come on in and have a look. I promise you will not be disappointed.

The year was 1974.  It was the summer between my eighth and ninth grade years.  My pals and I hung out at the swimming pool in Lexington, Nebraska nearly every day.  When we weren’t there, we were at the local pool hall learning to shoot nine ball and placing our quarter up to play the winner at the foosball table.  At the Municipool (our clandestine code name for the place), we swam some, but mostly we just hung around, smoked our cigarettes and tried our best to impress the girls.  We’d pay our .35 admission, go in, swim some, go outside, smoke, come back in, eyeball some chicks, swim some, go outside to smoke...Are you sensing a pattern here? 

 

On one particular day, a friend of one of my friends pulled up to our Marlboro smoking group in a four-door Rambler jalopy and asked if we wanted to hop in to cruise the streets with him.  Not much action at the Municipool that day so, "yeah, sure, we're in".  There were seven of us.  Counting our law abiding driver; eight, in a very small four door Rambler which had the same interior cargo area as a Port-a-Potty.  Somewhere along the drive, someone, it well could have been me, made the suggestion that we should maybe find some people to moon out the car windows.  Whether or not it was a good idea or a bad one just didn’t “occur” to me or any of my pals. Again, it was 1974.  Streaking was being sung about on the radio by Ray Stevens and American Graffiti was the hot new movie with a mooning scene in it.  I mean it would've been almost UN-American to simply TALK about mooning when here we were ready, willing and able, right?  I mean, RIGHT?  If you disagree, you’re probably a communist. 

It was broad daylight and there were so many of us in that car.  Thirteen and fourteen year old boys are tough enough to contain with any semblance of order, but stuff seven or eight of them in a tiny clown car and you have the potential for mayhem.  Mooning seemed like the right thing to do because something had to give.  We were not yet skilled at cruising around and looking cool with no cares in the world.  We did have cares, big ones.  None of us could probably have told you what those cares were at that moment, but we had ‘em.  That’s right, big cares, really big, important cares.  Big fat HUGE cares.  Now back to my story about the group of young intellectuals with all these cares who were on a downward spiral toward certain destruction.

Mooning out the car windows, it seemed to just kind of flow, the thought of it that is.  Car windows.  Bare butt cheeks being hung out of car windows.  It was a good fit.  Kind of like horse and saddle or spaceman and rocket.  Mooning from a car window had benefits for others as well.  The general public would be getting a much needed laugh after a difficult day at the...wherever it was they went (again, we were teenagers, we weren’t required to know this stuff).  It was perfect.  We were already in our swim trunks, so there wouldn’t be any unnecessary fumbling with zippers, belt buckles, etc.  We were also willing.  Willing to do whatever was necessary to lift the spirits of our fellow man.  One could even call it altruistic.  We were on standby, ready to sacrifice whatever we must for the betterment of mankind and ask nothing; nay nothing, in return.  And aside from all of that happy nonsense, we were in a ready made Moon-mobile and this was going to be fun as s--t!!!!  Is it just me or does everyone on the planet see the golden opportunity here? 

So the mooning began.  First, an old man and old lady walking down the street.  She started yelling at us, but the old man was laughing his butt off.  This fueled an already well stoked fire.  Next victim, please.  It was a couple in their driveway washing the family car, then a couple kids on their bikes, then a bus driver and a HOT high school chick, on to a restaurant with huge windows; it was like knocking down a row of dominos watching their reactions as we passed by.  Then we had somebody following us in another car.  We were gaining a following!  We were really starting something.  This was big, I tell you, BIG STUFF.  As I pulled a knee out of my back and made my way over the entanglement of arms, legs and torsos to the back window to moon our disciples behind us, visions of grandpa Todd telling his kids and their kids kids about the day the Moon shined over Lexington, Nebraska and how that one event freed the people of the tyrannical rule that "The Man" was trying to impose on all of us.  It would go down as, “Grandpa Todd, or even Great Grandpa Todd and the tale about all he did and sacrificed to free the masses from the imposed social order of the day”.  A story that would make its’ way into Kerchal infamy.  It’s kind of Abraham Lincoln-esque, to be humbly honest.  Picture the kids and grandkids looking upon me as a full blown hero here.  Strike that.  Picture them looking at me the way the townspeople looked at Hoss Cartwright whenever he had to come into Carson City and just kick the living crap out of a whole gang of outlaws.  The look I’m going for is THAT kind of awe.

Finally, after stepping on a few heads and crotches, I was in place.  And then it hit me.  Why hadn't anyone thought of this before?  It was brilliant I tell you, even (possibly) border-line genius.  Utilizing the rear window as a frame for an all out, full scale Mega Moon!  I’m picturing my great great great great grandkids around the campfire telling the newest Kerchal offspring about how fantastic it is that they are connected to this unbelievable gene pool.  Quickly, I convinced a few buddies to get up, man the right and left ends of the seat and prepare for a 3-way Mega-Moon, a mooning so well executed that no one will even have to TELL their grandkids about it, they will just already know.  

We decided to go on 3.  One, Two, THREE!!!!  OH YEAH!!  On what would have been 4, the red and blue lights from the unmarked police car behind us came on followed by the Whoop Whoop of their miserable siren.  Panic set in immediately. There was no where to run, no where to hide.  Our heroic deed was in full-on skid mode.  Mentally and visually I searched feverishly for an escape route, but alas, my great grandkids were the only ones who found a way out.

I had been in the Lexington police department many times before.  Why?  You may ask, is it because you were such a hellion that you and your bad attitude were used by the authorities when filming episodes of Scared Straight?  No, not that.  Was it because you were a big time informant and you had to come in weekly to get your snitch money?  Nope, not that either.  The answer is much less tough-guy than all of that.  It’s like this....you see...you may need to give me a moment because this part is the most difficult....I had been there so many times before because my mom worked there.  OK, the cat’s outta the bag now.  My mom was a dispatcher at the Lexington Police Station and she knew EVERYBODY there and EVERYTHING that ever happened or was about to happen in that little town. There was to be no escape from the wrath of Beverly.  She was off work that day, but something told me she probably already knew about my "incident".  Where's the tough guy with butt cheeks hanging out of the car window now?  No tough-guy, everybody, let's just move it along, nothing to see here, just a punk kid that's about to get a spanking from his mommy.....(Great grandkids are saying "Oh yeah, same last name and all, but no, no relation what-so-ever....").

They shuffled us into a conference room and put a phone on the table.  Cops can be sneaky that way.  Our task was to go one-at-a-time around the table until each one in our little octet of not so hairy streakers had called his parents and told them he needed to be picked up at the police station and why.  As the phone made its way around the table, the begging and pleas for mercy grew more intense.  Each kid had a tough time making the call, but when it came to me, I couldn't get the brain-to-arm connection to work.  The phone had been slid over in front of me, it was obviously my turn, but I just couldn't reach up and grab the receiver.  I would have sat there staring at that thing all day if it weren't for my good ol' pal Jonesy cuffing me a good one to the back of my head and saying "Move it along, Mega-Moon.  I did it, now it's your turn."

The reactions by both Kent and Beverly were detected on the richter scale at NORAD.  The seismologists thought it was some apocalyptic event occurring somewhere over in Asia Minor.  

For the longest time, if asked, I could never agree with anyone who might bring up my blunder.  “You have this completely turned around, my friend,” would be my retort, “that was some kids I KNEW who did that.  I was there, but I was in the corner reading my bible when it all went down.”

I am older now.  When rehashing these old memories of my misbegotten youth, I sometimes forget the shame I brought upon my family; mostly my mom.  She was tough on our little clan, but she did try to teach me to be better than all that.  She would always say, “Todd why can’t you get together with the kids that just want to have good, clean fun?”  Those of you who knew me back in those days know that what she was asking was simply outside my wheelhouse.  I had no reference point from which to begin a life of good, clean fun.  I also had no skills in the good, clean fun department.  She may as well have said “Todd, why don’t you invent the internet and work on getting a computer in every home?”  (remember, it was 1974, right?)  Imagine question marks flying out of my thought bubble when she hit me with the whole “good, clean fun” concept.  

Putting this down on paper has helped me to keep in touch with all of the early teenage feelings from back then.  Feelings that can completely immobilize a kid who had been caught smoking in the boys room so to speak.  It is dark and hollow, that spirit crushing feeling of impending doom. It is the feeling a kid has when knows he is SO busted and that he is going to have to confess all of his wretched acts to the ones he fears, and loves, the most.  I want to stay in touch with the tough parts, the stuff that helped to grow me up into a man with adult responsibilities and kids of his own.  Time has made it easy to lose touch with all of this from my youth.  To really get a handle on it, I may need to walk back through it a few more times.  

But I hope I never lose the music.  The music is the beautiful sound that plays in the background of your own life’s experiences.  Its lyrics are the hopeful desire to go back and relive, but can also be the cold hard fact that you cannot.  It is the memories.  It is the memories and the fine details of those memories.  It is the stuff that makes you smile when you are all alone knowing that there are maybe a few still around who have and hold dear the same memories as you.  It is that day you will never forget intermingled with a thousand days that are just the opposite, where nothing extraordinary happened at all.  

 

.....‘funny how you remember......I remember I remember I remember.....’

Bob Seger, Night Moves

It wasn’t even a song when this all took place.  It wouldn’t hit the charts for another few years.  But when Bob wails through his “I remembers”, I remember, and it is good.

Author's Note

Please leave your review. Thank you.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Love it! Mooning wasn't a thing yet when I was 14, (1962) but I've no doubt that me and my undisciplined, rowdy buddies would've been baring our derrieres all over the place, too. Like you and your friends, we we weren't bad kids, but we sure could act up. Tales like this are right down my alley.

[ToddK]

Thanks, Samuel. HA! Those were my good ole days. 1974 / 75 ish. Glad you liked it.

[ToddK]

I am still in touch with some of that group. Funny how we all became stiffened by time. I love to go back in my mind and relive those days.

[Samuel Dickens]

It's a wonderful thing to still have those friends. I'm still in contact with two of my old buddies.

[Christina Hill]

I really liked this story ! It certainly captured the time frame/phase of life that was probably the most carefree time in America ! Too bad you ended up at the police station. Most of us can relate. And speaking of relating, your stories are those that I think all of us can relate to. Please write a book of short stories !
Pleeeeaaaaasssssseeeee !

[ToddK]

Thank you Christina, you really gave my confidence a boost right there. I enjoyed writing this very truthful story and remember it all as if it were yesterday. :)