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That night, with Will driving the open car, they embarked on the usual round. After checking out the A&W drive-in in Concord—nothing but a handful of families with small children sitting at picnic tables on the concrete patio—the boys headed for the hamburger stand in Granite City. Soon the Porsche’s speedometer was hitting seventy-five on a straight stretch of road.
“One of the guys in my crew wrecked a mower this morning,” Will said, shouting, his words swept away by the wind roaring over the convertible. “Drove it right over a big rock. Snapped the blade.”
“What happened?”
“We all stood around and looked at it.”
“The crew chief didn’t get pissed?”
“The chief was out, so an old guy was in charge, and he always expects everything to go wrong. He used to be a miner. He’s from Hungary, and he hardly speaks English. ‘Sumbubbabitch.’ ”
“What?” John could barely hear.
“That’s all he ever says: ‘SUMBUBBABITCH!’ ”
John laughed. The leathery new-car smell of the Porsche’s interior made him feel giddy.
Bill’s Burgers in Granite City was squeezed between an abandoned tire store and a Shell station that had closed for the night. A single pickup sat in the mocking brightness of the parking lot. The boys bought their hamburgers at the stand’s small, screened window, then used the Porsche’s hood as a table to avoid the risk of sullying the sparkling new interior. After a while, the short-order cook, a young man wrapped in a dirtied white apron, stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. He recognized the boys and walked over.
“Hey, nice wheels, Ouija,” he said. His name was Theron, and he knew Will and John from basketball games. Once they’d brought along a friend from Bethesda who’d used their joint nickname, and Theron had been alert enough to pick it up, wielding it afterward with a slight edge of mockery.
“My old man’s,” said Will.
“That’s some old man,” Theron reflected.
“The only one I got.”
Theron inspected the car, and Will did an adequate job of parrying questions, though Theron clearly knew far more about the workings of an automobile than either Will or John did.
“You boys just cruising?” Theron asked.
“Looking for action,” John said.
Theron grinned. He was a few years older than the boys, and smoking had already started to stain his teeth. “I heard there’s a hot stripper at a carnival at Gunther,” he said.
“No shit.” John worked to contain his excitement.
“You ought to check her out.”
“Maybe we will.”
Theron dropped his cigarette on the pavement and crushed it with his sneaker. “Well,” he said, sighing, “I better get back behind the grill. I hope you enjoyed the hamburgers.”
“Needs more pickle,” Will called after him.
Gunther lay thirty miles or so deeper into the Blue Ridge, well beyond the boys’ normal loop. But the prospect of seeing a stripper was too good to pass up. The road climbed in curves up the side of a gentle mountain, then cut through a pass and wound down a wooded valley. The sky overhead was a bedsheet of stars. John slouched in the bucket seat, sliding closer to his friend so they could talk without fighting the wind. The trip took nearly an hour, and their conversation covered girls, sex, college prospects, Basic Instinct, politics, sports, Nirvana, the LA riots, and much, much more. Reflecting on it years later, John sometimes wondered—where did all the opinions, the ideas, the vitality come from?
In Gunther, they parked diagonally in front of the bank and walked to the edge of town. The carnival had colonized a rubbly vacant lot. Strings of colored lights enclosed a dusty encampment of booths, tents, and rides. The boys bought Cokes and wandered the grounds. Crowds filled the paths, and speakers on lampposts layered the place with blasts of tinny rock music. Will and John passed up countless games of skill—a noisy rifle range where cork bullets bounced off flat, metal ducks; a pitching contest that invited contestants to throw baseballs covered in black tape at stacks of bottles; a small basketball court. “Gyps,” Will said knowingly. “Rigged to make you lose.” In the lot’s far corner, the boys came upon a tent with a sign out front announcing Boris The Wrestling Bear and promising twenty-five dollars to anyone who could pin the creature within five minutes. But there was no sign of a stripper.
The boys sidled up to the man running the Tilt-a-Whirl. “Say,” John said politely, “we heard there was a strip show here.”
The man yanked a long lever on his machine and waited for the Tilt-a-Whirl platform to start its rotation. “You’re looking for a strip show,” he repeated finally. He studied the boys from under the brim of an Atlanta Braves cap.
“Yeah.” John tried to sound cool about it.
“This here’s the Holmes Carnival,” the man said, “and Ted Holmes, he don’t believe in that sort of entertainment. It’s a family carnival.”
“There’s no stripper?” Will couldn’t hide his disappointment.
